


Never Call Me Baby

by firbolg_boyfriends



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: (it's a whole ride), Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Human, Angst and Humor, Awkward Flirting, Beau being a gay disaster, Bittersweet, Coming of Age, F/F, First Kiss, Friendship, Trans Mollymauk Tealeaf, Underage Drinking, and experiencing complicated emotions, dumb teen antics, yearning! oh the yearning!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:08:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23835121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firbolg_boyfriends/pseuds/firbolg_boyfriends
Summary: Beau is on the cusp of everything: college, adulthood, the rest of her life. Before all that can start, though, she just has to stick it out for one more summer in her hometown, working at the local grocery store, horsing around with her best friend, tolerating her neighbors and coworkers, crushing on girls, yearning for freedom, staving off adolescent ennui - and maybe experiencing a little love and heartache. This is the summer when things will change. (Maybe more than she initially expected.)(A story about the complicated feelings that arise from growing up, the ridiculous moments and emotionally raw moments that jumble together in daily life, falling in love, wishing things were different, struggling to overcome self-doubt, stargazing, school orchestra, and overpriced drinks from multinational coffee franchises)
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & Caleb Widogast, Beauregard Lionett & Mollymauk Tealeaf, Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett
Comments: 30
Kudos: 120





	1. May

**Author's Note:**

> Me? Back with another high school AU that started out solely comedic and ended up gut-wrenching? Oh you bet!
> 
> Lately a lot of high school memories have been bobbing to the surface for me and this fic is sort of my way of processing that. It's also a bit of a time-travelling love letter to my eighteen-year-old gay idiot self. I should note that this story is not directly inspired by my life, but it does feature my high school job (just like my last beauyasha fic featured my high school car!) It's also something of a gift for anyone graduating high school in this weird, uncertain time. All my love to you.
> 
> I have another wip that I lowkey really need to finish so I'm not sure how fast this one will update for the time being, but once my other fic is complete, this one should be done fairly quickly. I hope you enjoy <3
> 
> **Content warnings for this chapter:** drug mention, implied mention of a past suicide attempt. If you want to skip them, jump from the line "'I just wrote essays all the time about how I'm an orphan'" to "He'd become sort of different over the last two years"

Someday, Beau knew, she would encounter an older, distinguished lady with a fur coat and a Louis Vuitton purse who would buy her whatever she wanted and let her stay in her opulent countryside mansion in exchange for subtext-heavy conversation over caviar and pinot grigio. (And sexual favors, of course.) And once that happened, she wouldn’t have to bother with college or a savings account or working terrible retail jobs because everything would be set for her. She could just spend all day practicing martial arts on the marble patio with her music blasting as loud as she wanted it. She could go swimming in a gloriously blue pool and nobody would yell at her for being topless. Instead of watching randomized ‘The L Word’ re-runs on late-night cable she could commission artists to make beautiful queer films just for her to enjoy in her lady friend’s home theater with a tall bellini.

Of course, that probably wouldn’t happen for at least, like, a year. Okay, maybe more than a year. (Like, two years?) (Three, tops.) In the meantime, she was stuck doing shit like this. Working at the coffee counter in Save-Mart. Wearing an ugly maroon apron and visor. Half-assing her way through the state-sanctioned online food service workers’ certification (complete with cartoon bacteria winking at her from the corners of the web page). Making minimum wage and using it to buy late-night tacos and eat them with her best friend in a parked car outside CVS. Daydreaming about September, when she could finally leave this god-awful town and go be a real adult at a university.

And… spending roughly twenty hours per week involuntarily hanging out with Caleb From AP European History. For some reason their manager always scheduled them for shifts together. Beau couldn’t figure out if it was supposed to be a misguided favor or a passive-aggressive punishment.

“What did you think about the video we watched in AP Euro today, Beauregard?” he asked, sounding like he was trying very hard to pretend he cared about the answer. It was a slow day at the register, so they were standing next to each other at the industrial sink, catching up on dishes that needed washing. His ginger ponytail color-clashed with his maroon visor in a way that wasn’t an obvious faux pas, but definitely vaguely unsettling to the eye.

“I think I fell asleep.”

“Your eyes were open…?”

Beau scowled at him. “I was mentally asleep. And why were you looking at me, anyway?”

He sighed, passing her a pitcher to rinse. “I sit next to you, Beauregard.”

She grimaced at his freckled hands. His hands were generally where she focused her gaze when she was too irritated to look at his face. “Well, sorry I’m not, like, super engaged in that class.”

“What is your issue with that class, anyway? I like Mr. Crzwjysewicz.”

“Mr. Cw– Mr. Ch– Oh, I can never pronounce that guy’s fuckin’ name. Anyway, he’s fine. I just think Europe is boring as fuck. Don’t you?”

Caleb paused, another pitcher in his hand. “I mean, I’m from there…”

Beau took the pitcher from him. “Yeah?”

He shrugged. “Ja, okay. You have a point.”

She glanced at him to make sure he wasn’t actually offended. She disliked him as a person, but she didn’t want to be a total asshole. His lips twitched with a private smile and she inwardly sighed in relief.

“Why are you taking that class, anyway? If it’s, as you say…” he paused thoughtfully, “‘boring as fuck’?”

Beau snickered, nearly dropping the cocktail shaker she was holding. Hearing him say ‘fuck’ in his dumb German-exchange-student accent was just unbelievably funny. She needed to figure out how to make him say it more. (Or maybe she was just losing her mind after being in this godforsaken coffee stand for four and a half hours today.)

“Well,” she cleared her throat, “I only signed up for it because my parents wanted me to and they’d find out if I didn’t do it.” She cast her eyes down, focusing very hard on scrubbing the remnants of a smoothie out of the cocktail shaker. This conversation was rapidly becoming far too personal for coworkers at a coffee shop that was inside a grocery store. And high school classmates. And Quiz Bowl teammates – okay, fine, so she knew Caleb better than she liked to admit. To be fair, though, she barely showed up to Quiz Bowl. Molly had agreed to forge her signature on the attendance sheet if she bought him breakfast from the coffee shop once a week – the good independent café down the street from their school, not the shitty multinational franchise where Beau and Caleb worked.

Beau had no idea why Molly was even on the Quiz Bowl team. He had a terrible memory for trivia and the only category he genuinely liked was mythology, but he wasn’t even good at that because he always embellished the myths with his own narrative flourishes. (He did it so much that it probably wasn’t even intentional at this point.)

She also had no idea why he’d applied to work at Save-Mart, but not at the coffee counter. He was an employee at the sandwich deli on the other side of the store. She could kind of see him sometimes if she stood in a certain corner of the coffee stand and if they happened to have shifts that overlapped. He wore a dark green visor that looked weird with his purple hair – she liked to remind him of this by taking spy shots and sending them to him. (If her manager ever bothered to look at the security footage and see that she had her phone out at work, Beau would just take the L. She figured the odds were in her favor.)

Caleb was giving her this funny look.

“What’s with you?” she asked, scowling again.

He shook his head, a piece of ginger hair falling from behind his ear. “Nothing. It’s just – you act like you’re this badass who doesn’t care about anything, but you still listen to your parents.”

She briefly wondered how much trouble she would get in for pouring out a pitcher of soapy water on his head. “I don’t – okay, what else am I supposed to do? I live with them!”

“I guess that’s fair. I don’t live with mine right now, so I can sort of do what I want as long as it isn’t obviously discernible from my bank account records. And I have a job now so they shouldn’t be complaining if they look there.”

“Why – oh, they’re in Germany, I guess.”

He nodded. “Ja. The reason I’m working here is because my living stipend from my home school cuts off in June and I don’t want to go back to Germany quite yet.”

“Why?”

“You’re very nosy, do you know that?”

She glanced up at him, scoffing. “I’m not – I wasn’t – I mean, nobody’s making you answer!” she sputtered.

His lips twitched again. Thin white-boy lips. “If you must know. Even though I hate America – sorry –”

“No worries, I hate it just as much.” She flapped a dishrag to try and dry it out.

He chuckled lightly. “Even though I hate America, I’ve sort of… grown fond of it. The way you grow fond of a cat who is always rude to you.”

“Sure,” Beau said, rolling her eyes.

“And more importantly, I like being independent. I don’t want to go back to living with my parents just yet.”

Beau sighed heavily. “I hear that. I can’t wait for college. I’m gonna do so much crazy shit. I mean, do you do a bunch of crazy shit? Like, now?”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully, running a cup under the faucet. “Well, I do still live with a host family. So I don’t have total freedom. But I have more freedom than I would living with my own family. Last night –” he smirked conspiratorially, “I stayed up until one am watching documentaries.”

Every time Beau started to feel like maybe Caleb wasn’t so bad after all, he conveniently said something to remind her that she couldn’t stand him. “I can’t believe this,” she said, shaking her head incredulously. “Freedom is wasted on you.”

“How offensive,” Caleb said, not sounding particularly offended. “What would you do with all your freedom?”

Beau straightened up, grinning. “Well, I’d get even more drastic with my hair.”

He frowned. “‘Even more?’ It just looks… normal. Right now.”

“Okay, but look at this –” She reached to push the ends of her brunette bob up over her ears, revealing the shaven undercut beneath. “Look! Molly helped me do this at a sleepover a couple weeks ago. My parents still haven’t realized because I just keep my top hair down all the time. It’s genius! Once I get to college, though, I won’t have to have a hairstyle that can be hidden. I could shave the sides! I could shave all of it! Or I could even just keep it this way but tie the top part up in a knot! The possibilities are endless!”

“What is the purpose of having it shaved if no one ever sees it?” Caleb pointed out.

Beau huffed. “Well, maybe I’ll start tying it up at work and taking it down before I get home, then! And anyway, just – it’s still cool even if only I know how cool it is! And Molly, I guess. And, like… you.”

He still looked vaguely nonplussed, pale eyebrows furrowed. “Okay. Maybe this is a cultural thing that isn’t quite translating.”

She resisted the urge to stomp her foot. “I’m a badass!” she insisted. (Perhaps a bit more loudly than she’d intended.)

Just then, they were interrupted by the sound of someone clearing their throat. They both jumped – Beau startled so hard she nearly threw the measuring cup she was holding across the coffee stand. (She had an unfortunate tendency to projectile-hurl whatever was in her hands as a surprise reaction.)

“I’m sorry to bother you,” the girl on the other side of the register said, voice hesitant.

Caleb dried his hands on his apron. “Do not apologize. We’re being paid to attend to you. In fact, one of us is supposed to be keeping an eye on the register today,” he added, flicking his eyes at Beau.

Beau normally would’ve met that with a biting retort, but she was too busy staring avidly at the girl. She wore a dark green apron and visor, which meant she worked with Molly in the deli – Beau made a mental note to call him for an interrogation as soon as she clocked out today. She must be a new hire, because otherwise there was no way Beau could’ve worked here this long without spotting her. To begin with, she was tall as hell. Nearly six feet, maybe – and with a mane of black hair that was bleached bone-white at the ends, half-pulled away from her face to reveal ears studded with metal spikes and smoky whorls of dark makeup surrounding her ice-blue eyes. Her black polo shirt (the one all the Save-Mart employees wore) revealed alarmingly toned biceps, with part of a complicated-looking tattoo armband peeking out from one of the sleeves. There was even what looked like a faint, thin-lined tattoo on her chin – sort of a branch-like design extending upwards to her lip.

She was, quite possibly, the single most badass-looking human being Beau had ever seen in her waking life. Was this what love at first sight felt like?

The girl cleared her throat – her voice was softer and more feminine than Beau would expect from her appearance, but somehow that made her even hotter. Beau could already feel the force of the tidal wave of gay daydreams (gaydreams?) that would surely crash over her helpless form in the coming weeks.

“I was just –”

“You have a face tattoo!” Beau blurted, because she was dumb and terrible and should never be let out of the house.

Caleb flashed her a look that said ‘you’re dumb and terrible and should never be let out of the house.’ “I’m sorry for my associate’s rudeness –”

“Your ‘associate’?” Beau asked him incredulously, momentarily distracted by Caleb’s Caleb-ness.

“It’s okay,” the girl said quickly, waving a placating hand. “It’s a… it’s a Berber thing. Like, a traditional tattoo that older people have. I got it to honor my heritage.”

“…Berber?”

“I’m from Morocco,” the girl clarified. Caleb nodded politely but Beau wasn’t listening.

“That’s so fuckin’ cool…” she breathed. Beyond awestruck. “I want a tattoo…”

The girl shrugged. Shyly. She was hot and also cute? Beau couldn’t handle this. She was combusting.

“How… old are you?” Caleb asked.

“Eighteen.”

“You must’ve gotten those recently, then,” he said, gesturing vaguely at her two visible tattoos.

The girl shrugged again. Oh, she was so mysterious. Oh, Beau was so into it. “I’m eighteen, too!” she yelled.

“Stop yelling, we’re at work,” Caleb hissed at her.

The girl cleared her throat. “Anyway… I was just wondering if I could come over here and order a drink for my coworker. He can’t come here himself because he’s very busy at the moment.”

Technically, it was company policy that Save-Mart employees could order food from within Save-Mart (like, from the bakery or the deli or the coffee stand) and the person at the register would key in a special combination of codes to dock four dollars or so from their next paycheck as payment. However, everyone sort of mutually, silently agreed that that policy sucked shit and most people just gave their coworkers free coffee and sandwiches unless they were real assholes. Beau had gotten multiple mini containers of potato salad from Molly but he refused to order coffee from her because he said she’d probably poison it.

Beau narrowed her eyes suspiciously and leaned over to try and see if Molly was at the deli. She barely caught sight of a head of purple curls ducking below the counter. Thank god there weren’t many customers around Save-Mart today – the unprofessionalism was really getting out of hand this evening. (She wasn’t being judgmental because she knew she was part of the problem.)

“What is he so busy with?” Beau asked, somewhat skeptical. Molly was literally never busy. With anything. And even if he was, he immediately jumped at the slightest opportunity to go do something else instead.

The girl shrugged again. She shrugged a lot. Beau could get into that.

Caleb leaned over to peer at the deli himself, but Molly had vanished from view. “What would he… like to order?” He sounded mildly confused, which made sense because as far as he could tell no one else was working at the deli today.

The girl drew a scrap of paper out of her apron pocket and squinted at it. “Erm… a tall glass of… German ginger ale?”

Caleb frowned. “I don’t think we have that. But I’ll check in the back.”

Beau sighed heavily. “Don’t bother, it’s just Molly being a fucking idiot…” she trailed off. Caleb was already walking across the store to the employees-only storage rooms.

She looked back at the girl. Who was still watching her, with those… arresting eyes.

Beau cleared her throat nervously. It was so hard talking to attractive women, because she felt like her body went into fight-or-flight mode – the sweaty palms, the pounding heart, the tingling all over her skin – and that made it so difficult to concentrate on anything, let alone whatever words were coming out of her mouth. And, horrifically, the words always continued to come out of her mouth even as she was busy focusing on how uncomfortably hot her cheeks felt. Most of the time she ended up spouting nonsense and not realizing it until after the fact when she clocked the girl’s considering silence and bemused facial expression.

“What’s your name?” she asked. Okay, thank god. That was a normal thing to ask.

The girl tapped her metal name tag. “Yashemeen, technically. But you can call me Yasha. Everyone does.”

Yasha. Yasha, Yasha. Yasha, Yasha, Yasha, Yasha, Yasha. Beau figured she’d better get used to the name of the star of her nightly dreams for the next month. “Hi, Yasha,” she said, in a tone that she could already tell sounded horrifyingly giggly and dopey. So much for looking cool in front of the coolest fucking girl she’d ever met.

Yasha squinted at Beau’s name tag. “Hi… Belvedere?”

“Beauregard. But you can call me Beau. Everyone does. Except for my parents. And him,” she jerked her head at the lanky, freckled figure approaching them through the pasta aisle.

“We don’t have any ginger ale,” Caleb said, re-entering the coffee stand. “Tell your friend sorry. It was nice to meet you…”

“Yasha,” Beau finished for him.

Yasha shot her a small smile. And Beau felt a shot of adrenaline.

“Yasha. Well… see you later.” Caleb turned around to continue washing the dishes. Beau jerked her thumb at his back and made a face at Yasha like ‘can you believe this guy?’ Yasha giggled slightly. Maybe Beau wasn’t so desperately uncool after all. Thank god for Caleb being around, looking even less cool by comparison. (His presence really did serve a purpose, evidently.) (He was also a much, much better employee than Beau was, so his presence served that purpose as well.)

“See you guys later,” Yasha said, turning to head back over to the deli. Beau tried not to watch the way her hips moved as she walked away. (She totally did watch, of course, because she was dumb and terrible and shouldn’t be let out of the house.)

“She seems nice,” Caleb remarked off-handedly.

“She’s so hot…” Beau breathed, unable to stop herself.

Caleb raised an amused eyebrow. “You should go order a sandwich from her after you clock out. Which,” he paused to check his watch, “you actually should have done about ten minutes ago.”

“Goddammit!”

He shrugged. “At least you’ll get paid overtime. Ten minutes of overtime.”

“I know, but the boss always gets pissed about overtime.”

“I’ll tell her one of the customers dropped their drink and you had to stay late to clean up the mess.”

Beau paused as she untied her apron, staring at him thoughtfully. He wasn’t looking at her – he was busy reorganizing the tea shelves, which always got ridiculously messy during Beau’s shifts. (It wasn’t her fault, okay? It was hard to make sure she was always putting the teabags back in the correct boxes. There was never enough time to read the labels and sometimes the colors looked almost the same! And she’d only given a customer the wrong tea, like, four times.)

“Thanks… Caleb.” She tried to paste on a smile and found it wasn’t actually so difficult. Maybe Caleb wasn’t completely awful. Despite all his irritating characteristics and the fact that he carried a TI-84 around in his jacket pocket ‘just in case’.

He peered over his shoulder, quirking a half-smile. He had the sort of hollow-looking cheeks that stretched taut whenever his mouth moved. “Don’t worry about it. Isn’t that what you Americans say?”

She rolled her eyes, yanking off her visor. “Yeah. I guess so.” Then she paused again. “Wait. What if she checks the security footage?”

Caleb smirked. Beau smirked too. “She never does,” they said unison.

After Beau clocked out, slinging her drawstring bag over her shoulder and heading to the parking lot, she tossed one last glance towards the deli. Yasha’s ludicrously tall figure and mountain of bicolored curls were instantly noticeable even from a distance.

Molly stood slightly farther away, half-hidden by an industrial refrigerator. His eyebrow hoop winked in the fluorescent light. Beau was desperately envious of Molly’s piercings. His foster parents let him get away with pretty much whenever he wanted because they had five other children (wards, Molly jokingly called them) to take care of. Compared to some of the hijinks his siblings got up to, Molly going to the tattoo shop at the mall and paying to have holes poked in his ears and nose was fairly tame. Beau wished her parents shared that attitude.

He caught her eye and wiggled his fingers in a teasing wave. She stuck her tongue out at him. He made a heart with his hands. She flipped him off. He blew her a kiss. She made the ‘I’m watching you’ signal with her index and middle finger, and he laughed. She couldn’t hear him laughing from where she was, but she could see it on his face.

She’d miss this, she thought, once she moved into some rich older lesbian’s illustrious country manor. Not the shitty job, of course, but doing the shitty job with her best friend. And her somewhat-okay classmate. And her brand-new crush. Being weird. Being miserable together in a way that was almost fun.

&

“Hey. Beau. Psst. Beau! Beauuuregaaaaard.”

It took Beau about a full minute to realize Jester was talking to her. In her defense, there was another kid in their class named Bo, and Jester sat behind her so she couldn’t exactly see who she was looking at.

“Oh my god, what?” Beau whispered, twisting around in her seat.

“How do you do this problem?” Jester asked, holding up her calculus worksheet. She tapped it with her pencil. The paper made a hollow crackling sound.

Beau squinted at it. “Fuck if I know. I haven’t even gotten to that part yet.”

Jester pouted. “Let’s work on it together then!”

“Okay, fine.” Beau moved her backpack so she could switch her legs to the other side of her seat.

Jester wasn’t exactly Beau’s friend, but she also wasn’t… not Beau’s friend. They’d gone to school together since kindergarten and for years they’d just sort of been cordial classmates whose circles intermittently overlapped. Theirs was the sort of relationship you had with anyone you’d known for that many years but never grew close to – they didn’t have each other’s phone numbers, but they vaguely remembered the embarrassing things they’d done when they were eight years old. They were Facebook friends but only because it would be weirder if they weren’t. Their moms kind of knew each other from PTO events. Beau had only ever been to Jester’s house for her seventh birthday party when she invited everybody in their first-grade class, but she could probably still find Jester’s house if she really tried to because she knew it was in the suburb adjacent to hers.

Jester’s appearance had obviously changed in the last decade or so, but Beau only paid attention to it in the way she paid attention to how long her own hair was growing, which is to say, seldom except in sudden, seemingly random bursts of awareness.

Like now. Jester had put on a little bit of makeup – Beau couldn’t remember when she’d started wearing makeup. It was subtle. Just a little bit of glitter around the corners of her eyes, heavier lashes, darker lips. Her face didn’t look all that different from the way it usually did, but the makeup had simply drawn Beau’s attention to the features that were already there. She did have nice lips, really. A very pleasant Cupid’s bow shape.

A moment passed before Beau realized that Jester had said something else to her but she hadn’t heard it because she’d been zoned out, thinking about Jester’s pretty face. That was… embarrassing. “Sorry, what?” she asked, voice gruff. Her voice tended to go gruff to cover her embarrassment. Thank god Jester didn’t know her well enough to be aware of that tic. (Probably.)

“I just said, ‘What are you doing after school today, Beau?’” Jester giggled.

Beau glared. “What’s so funny? Stop giggling!”

“Nothing! You’re just spacing out a lot, Beau, are you good?”

“Fuck off, I’m just tired,” Beau mumbled. She trained her eyes on the blank classroom wall behind Jester to prevent herself from getting homosexually distracted again.

“What ARE you doing after school, though?” Jester asked.

“Why?”

“Just asking! For conversation! You’re very defensive, Beau, you know.”

“I am not!” Beau said. Defensively.

Jester tilted her head, re-entering Beau’s sightline. Her blue-dyed hair glistened in the overhead light. She quirked her eyebrow.

Beau sighed and cast her eyes down to the desk. What was wrong with her today? She couldn’t remember how to talk just because a girl had raised an eyebrow at her. This was way out of hand. “Uhhh… I’m….” God, what were words? How did people say things? “I’m… working.” (It was true. She had a shift right after sixth period.)

“Oh,” Jester pouted. “I’m not.”

“Do you have a job?”

“Yeah. I work at the fro-yo place on Twenty-fifth, remember?”

Beau frowned. “Why would I remember that?”

“Because you and Molly have been there while I was working, silly. We said hi to each other and everything. Well, I said hi, and Molly said hi back.”

Jester hummed a pop song as she continued working on the calculus problem. Beau narrowed her eyes. “When was this?”

“Like, five months ago.”

“Five months ago?”

“Mm-hmm.” The little bell on the end of Jester’s pencil jingled.

“I don’t even remember what happened five hours ago.”

Jester giggled again. “You’re kind of rude, Beau –”

“Hey!”

“Let me finish! You’re kind of rude, but I can tell that underneath, you’re a big softie.” Jester stopped writing to look up at her, smirking.

Beau scoffed. “Um, I’m definitely not. I’m hardcore.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I am!”

“I’m trying to give you a compliment, silly!”

“Saying I’m a softie is not a compliment,” Beau muttered, rapping the desk with her own pencil.

“It is, actually. It means you’re nice. And sweet.”

“Not sweet. And not nice,” Beau grumbled.

Jester just giggled even harder. “You’re lucky you have me around, you know. I’m one of the only people around here who can see the golden heart below your rough exterior.”

“Okay, whatever.”

Jester shook her bangs out of her eyes and went back to her work, a smile still on her lips. Beau consciously stopped looking at her lips.

She was wrong, Beau thought. Not about the softie thing – that was probably true, unfortunately. But about nobody else being able to notice it. She felt like everyone in the world could see right through her disguise. Everyone knew that she was only pretending to be a badass – that she barely even knew how to be a badass.

Maybe she should start wearing her hair up. Then at least the undercut would be visible.

&

Molly’s eighteenth birthday lay in the middle of the summer – he was always at the youngest end of his grade. Technically he was about to age out of the foster system, but his parents were letting him stay with them through summer break until he moved into the college dorms in fall. They were also helping him with tuition. He’d managed to get a lot of scholarships, though, despite not being a particularly motivated student.

“I just wrote essays all about how I’m an orphan and I used to be so depressed but now I have a sparkling new lease on life,” he said. Half-jokingly.

In the middle of their sophomore year, Molly had disappeared from school (and from the grid in general) for about a month. Most of their classmates hadn’t known why – they still didn’t know, but the allure of the mystery had faded with time and now nobody ever talked about it anymore. Beau knew why. He’d been a very unhappy kid throughout middle school, and high school was a yet more treacherous crucible. Eventually things had taken a very scary turn and he had to be rushed to the ER. And then to a psych ward.

He didn’t often talk about what it was like in the psych ward, beyond anecdotes about the unusual people he interacted with. (Like his temporary roommate, a middle-aged woman who talked out loud to herself in various accents and Molly always responded, assuming she was talking to him. Or the roommate he’d had after that, who’d smoked a smuggled joint with him late one night and then gotten them both in trouble when Molly was noticeably still stoned during his physical the next morning.) It was the sort of humor where Beau wasn’t entirely sure if she was supposed to laugh or not. Molly laughed, though. He seemed good-natured about the whole thing, but there was always something in his eyes.

He’d become sort of different over the last two years. He got very into spirituality, for one. He carried at least one pack of tarot cards in his backpack at all times and often brought them out at lunch. He asked everyone for their time and date of birth so he could look up their zodiac chart and smirk at them like he knew their secrets. He meditated, he filled his tiny bedroom with crystals from the pagan store near the mall and herb samples from the community garden behind the middle school, he held rituals to cleanse his energy and ward off negativity. Beau got on board with all of it, for the most part, because she cared about her best friend and because, well… who knew? Something was working for Molly. Maybe it was just the counseling. The counseling was definitely part of it, but maybe the divine force of the universe was contributing to Molly’s well-being as well. (She couldn’t get on board with reiki healing, though, no matter how many blog posts Molly sent her about it.)

He was also more confident than he used to be. Or maybe just less self-conscious. In freshman year he’d tried very hard to appear as inoffensively masculine as possible so that nobody would assume he was a girl. Nowadays he wore the loudest, most ostentatious garments he could find, sometimes from the women’s section, and people still sometimes assumed he was a girl but he’d become a lot more laissez-faire about letting them know they were wrong.

A lot of people found him off-putting. They didn’t dislike him, per se, but he was just so strange-looking that they assumed they wouldn’t have much in common with him and he was so centered within himself, even at a young age, that maybe they really didn’t have much in common with him. He’d experienced more trauma in the last few years than many of his classmates might experience before they turned thirty and he’d come out the other side of it – not necessarily perfectly strong or perfectly wise, but stronger and wiser than you’d expect from the average almost-eighteen-year-old. And with a lot more feather boas and rhinestone belts than you’d expect from the average almost-eighteen-year-old. He didn’t quite fit in.

He fit in with Beau, though.

She wasn’t sure how they’d become so close – they were only acquaintances in middle school, and even in freshman year they hadn’t known each other very well. Their friendship had sort of happened accidentally and if you asked either of them to explain how they transitioned from classmates-who-nodded-at-each-other-in-the-hallway to siblings-in-everything-but-blood, neither of them would be able to clearly recall the process.

And yet, here they were. Beau couldn’t imagine her life without him. He didn’t make sense to most of their classmates, but in Beau’s mind he was the only person she knew who made any sense at all.

Today they’d skipped Quiz Bowl to hit up the Dairy Queen drive-through and share a sundae as they sat on the playground swings at the elementary school – not the one Beau had gone to, but the one that was close to Dairy Queen. The sun was so bright that it washed out Molly’s violet curls. Or maybe the dye was just fading. It was the sort of hot day in May where they’d both worn sweaters to school because the morning had been cold, and now they were both kind of sweaty.

Molly sucked on his plastic spoon, kicking up a spray of wood chips under his embroidered knockoff Docs. “Do you think Coach is gonna send us another one of those passive-aggressive emails because we didn’t log enough hours this month?”

Beau passed him the sundae so he could take another spoonful. The ice cream was starting to melt. “I had Caleb sign for both of us on the attendance sheet. I told him I’d give him rides to school every day next week.”

“Oh – so, are you, like, friends with him now?”

She shrugged, squinting in the sunlight. “Not sure. I guess so? I think he’s just grown on me from exposure. You know, because I’m stuck with him in that goddamn coffee stand all the time.”

Molly hummed.

Beau raised an eyebrow. “I know you have a crush on him, by the way. You didn’t even have to tell me. I mean, like. You should’ve, though.”

“Is it that obvious?” he sighed.

“‘A tall glass of German ginger ale’?”

“It seemed like a cute idea at the time,” he said ruefully. “And anyway, I didn’t tell you directly because I was kind of embarrassed about how I have, like, zero chance with him. He’s way too smart for me!”

“Molly, don’t say that – you’re plenty smart.”

He huffed. “Okay, but I’m not smart in, like, the school way. You know what I mean. Like I can’t read very fast or concentrate on studying and it’s hard for me to trick myself into caring about the lectures enough to listen to them.”

“I get that. I think I only care because if I don’t get good enough grades, there will be very real tangible consequences in the form of, like, getting grounded and shit.”

“What are you gonna do in college? They can’t ground you anymore there.”

Beau shrugged. “Hopefully there the classes will be about things that I just… care about anyway.”

They both paused for a moment, imagining what kinds of classes they would care about anyway. “I think I just wanna join the circus,” Molly said mournfully.

Beau bit her lip. She wasn’t sure what she wanted. She was sort of interested in science and history, but never the aspects of science and history that she learned about in her AP classes. When she was younger and had more free time on her hands she used to research things she wanted to know more about, but it had been a very long time since she’d read a book that hadn’t been assigned to her for lit or looked something up on Wikipedia that wasn’t the answer to a question on her biology worksheet. She supposed she still did have a bit of free time – outside of school, work, and all her extracurriculars that she only marginally cared about, like Quiz Bowl and Coding League and volunteering at the notary public office – but she spent a lot of it hanging out with Molly, and when she wasn’t with Molly, she was lying on her bed (or her bedroom floor), too exhausted to do much besides scroll through her phone or just stare at the wall.

She wished her life was easy. She wished nothing was required of her. She wished she was adored and pampered unconditionally all day, every day, and never had to spend a second worrying that her needs might not be met – or feeling like they weren’t already being met. That was the dream.

“I just want a sugar mommy, I think,” she said thoughtfully. Molly snorted.

&

The annoying thing about working part-time was that Beau couldn’t really predict who else would have shifts at the same time as hers. Which meant that Yasha Sightings were, sadly, rare.

The next time Beau interacted with her directly happened a couple weeks after they met. Beau was in the back storage facility, getting more containers of milk out of the freezer room. She always forgot a jacket, and so she always walked out of the ice-white cave shivering and goosebumped, wreathed in fog.

In the cold, misty glow of the freezer room doorway, with her strange hair and strange eyes and her chin tattoo, Yasha looked like something mythical and otherworldly.

The scene was also more surreal because Yasha was sitting on the concrete floor, leaning against crates of oranges, arms piled over her knees. And there were tears streaming down her cheeks, which looked eerie and poetic because her face wasn’t contorted with a sob – her expression was calm. Almost blank.

Beau had to shake her head to remind herself of the reality of the situation. This wasn’t a scene from a painting – this was really in front of her, in the real world. The girl she liked. The girl she liked, who was crying! She should do something about that!

“Hey, are you all right?” Beau called out.

Yasha flicked her blue eyes up, wide and surprised. She shook her head slightly, the same way Beau had, and then she seemed to come back to herself a bit and lifted the hem of her apron to dab at her cheeks. “Um. I’m okay.” Her voice sounded thick and husky. The way people’s voices sounded after they’d been crying a lot.

“You’re clearly not,” Beau said, because she didn’t tolerate other people’s bullshit. (She was already full of her own bullshit.)

Yasha let out a short, throaty laugh, and sniffled a little. “You’re right. I’m not. Right now. But I generally am. Okay, I mean.”

Beau stared at her consideringly. She wondered if it would be appropriate to sit next to her and put her arm around her. Obviously, she wanted to. But she didn’t want to freak Yasha out, because they didn’t actually know each other very well. And she’d just said she was okay most of the time, which sounded like a thing people said when they weren’t actually okay most of the time, but Beau didn’t feel prepared to dispute Yasha’s claim because, again… they didn’t actually know each other very well.

She cleared her throat. “Do you… want a… hug?” she asked awkwardly, fixing her gaze on the floor. Her arms were cold from holding the milk. Hopefully Yasha wouldn’t mind that.

“Erm… sure. That would be all right.”

Beau nearly dropped the milk. Instead, she took a (discreet) deep breath and carefully set it on the floor, and then carefully sat down next to Yasha (the floor was uncomfortably hard and the orange smell was tangy in the air) and then carefully, oh so carefully, encircled Yasha’s shoulders with one of her arms. Yasha rotated her body so they were closer together, and Beau gently lifted the other arm to pat Yasha’s back.

Yasha was smaller than she looked. Beau didn’t even have to stretch her arms to hold her. She had pronounced spinal bones and her hair was somewhat coarse to the touch but her shoulders were softer than Beau would’ve thought and she kind of smelled like rosewater, which was an odd smell for someone so young. There were lots of things that were odd about Yasha. And Beau was enamored of all of them.

“I’m sorry,” Yasha said quietly.

Beau frowned. “What the hell for?”

“I’m sorry you’re seeing me like this. I feel… embarrassed.”

Beau sighed. She wanted to tell Yasha there was no reason to be embarrassed, but to be honest, she would also probably be embarrassed if her coworker found her crying next to the orange crates. But there really was no reason to be embarrassed, was there? People cried sometimes. It didn’t have to be a big fucking deal.

“People cry sometimes. It doesn’t have to be a big fucking deal.”

Yasha’s body shook with a soft laugh. Slowly, she pulled away from Beau, far enough that they could make eye contact. Which Beau immediately broke, because she was already emotionally compromised enough.

“Thank you. Beau.”

“Yeah, no problem,” Beau mumbled, picking at a loose thread in her black work slacks. She thought for a moment. “Hey, you know… you can talk to me. About, like, whatever’s going on. You know…” she trailed off. God, why was she so bad at talking?

Yasha smiled, but her eyes were still sad. And a little red. “Maybe.” She said it in a way that sounded like ‘probably not’. Oh, well. At least Beau had given it a shot.

For a moment, they were both silent.

“Well, I should –”

“Yeah, me too –”

They both stood, dusting off their aprons. “Oh, I should grab these,” Beau muttered, bending over to gather up the milk.

“Oh, I can help carry those,” Yasha said quickly, taking some of the containers. (Most of the containers.)

“Oh – okay. Uh, thanks,” Beau said, face hot. She was used to trying to impress girls by lifting things in front of them. It was weird to have the tables turned on her.

“Anything for a friend,” Yasha said simply, heading towards the door to the main store.

Beau stood still for a moment, trying to get her breathing under control. “Yeah, totally,” she replied. (Her voice was only slightly higher-pitched than normal.)


	2. June

Beau’s least favorite part of working at a multinational coffee franchise was – well, she had several least favorite parts of working at a multinational coffee franchise. But one of them was definitely the branded seasonal drinks. The Glitterpony Shake was among the absolute worst creations she’d ever had to degrade herself by concocting. (She was getting paid minimum wage to degrade herself, so she supposed it could be worse.)

Beginning earlier that spring, the faceless, omniscient entity known as ‘corporate’ had sent out boxes to all their thousands of branches, packed with cartons of a mysterious and frankly ominous sparkly purple substance known as Glitterpony Syrup, along with pamphlets explaining how employees were supposed to make the Glitterpony Shake. The recipe was the same as the one for the plain old Vanilla Cream Shake that was offered year-round, except the baristas were supposed to repeatedly pause while pouring it into the cup to add parfait-like layers of Glitterpony Syrup. Except, of course, the Glitterpony Shake cost a dollar fifty more than the Vanilla Cream Shake. It was criminal, really.

In Beau’s opinion, the syrup tasted like liquefied gummy bears – not her thing. But customers ordered it relentlessly nonetheless. Maybe something about the transience of the drink’s availability or the novelty of its garish magenta hue appealed to them. They kept running out of Glitterpony Syrup and had to tell their manager so she could apply to have corporate send more. Customers tended to get irrationally pissy when they ordered a Glitterpony Shake and Beau couldn’t provide it for them. “Isn’t that what this place is for?” they asked, irritably. “It’s what all of life is for,” Beau didn’t say. (Well, she’d said it once and her manager had brought her into her office for a stern lecture about not being snarky to customers.)

Now that it was June, corporate had unveiled the Glitterpony Pride Shake, which cost fifty cents more than the regular Glitterpony Shake and included layers of shimmery rainbow sprinkles above the layers of shimmery purple syrup. They were also supposed to top it with special pastel pink whipped cream, but Beau pretty much consistently forgot to add red food dye when she made new cannisters of whipped cream at the beginning of her shift. Sometimes she just used regular white and told customers that it WAS pink – couldn’t they see it? Maybe the lighting was just weird? (Caleb had initially told her off for ‘gaslighting the customers’ but even he eventually had to admit that it was an interesting social experiment.)

“This fuckin’ sucks,” Beau remarked fervently, shaking a nearly empty plastic container of rainbow Pride sprinkles.

Caleb stared at it, blue eyes tired. His face did this thing sometimes where it looked like he was sighing but he wasn’t actually sighing. “Are we out of that again?”

“I think there’s more in the back. I meant, like, this corporate Pride shit, though. It fuckin’ sucks,” she finished, increasing her emphasis.

Caleb shrugged. “If people are dumb enough to pay the extra fifty cents, that is their fault.”

“I think if a gay person orders this drink, they should get paid fifty cents. In addition to getting the drink for free. I think I, personally, as an el-gee-bee-tee, should get paid triple wages just for making it.”

“If that were true, I’d be more motivated to help you make them.”

It took Beau a moment to realize that Caleb had, actually, offloaded almost all the Glitterpony Shake preparation to her and she hadn’t noticed because she tended to just make drinks on autopilot when Caleb handed her a labeled cup. “Hey!” she yelled. And then another moment passed before she realized that Caleb might’ve just… come out to her. (In a really strange and indirect way.) “Wait… you’re gay?”

“Bi,” he corrected. He finished sticking a label onto a cannister of pink whipped cream, then looked up at her. “Don’t tell anyone though. I’m out, but I’m not, like… out.”

Beau nodded. She could understand. She hadn’t actually directly come out to anyone, besides a middle school friend she no longer saw much of and a random coworker from her job at the YMCA last summer. She generally just kind of assumed that people would look at how she dressed and how she acted, and notice her complete lack of interest in boys and her contrastingly high interest in writing reports about Joan of Arc, and her clunky thrift-store Timbs and her ’95 Subaru and just… get it. She felt like most people did and were too awkward to openly bring it up (which was fine with her, because she felt kind of awkward about it too). Molly had gotten it almost immediately. Sometimes people were obtuse, though.

“I’m a lesbian, by the way,” she informed Caleb archly.

He nodded. “I know. I’m not obtuse.”

“Oh. Okay.” She paused. “Wait, is it, like, really obvious?”

“Kind of. After we met Yasha, the first thing you said to me was that you thought she was hot.”

Okay, that was fair. “Straight girls sometimes get really struck by other girls’ hotness…”

Caleb pursed his lips skeptically.

Beau opened her mouth to say something else, but she trailed off as she noticed two familiar figures approaching the coffee stand. One with extremely familiar blue hair, knotted up in space buns with jeweled hairclips.

Beau generally didn’t like it when her classmates ordered coffee from her. It was weird interacting with them in that context, and she also didn’t like anyone from school seeing how stupid her work uniform looked. She considered hiding below the counter, but it was too late – Jester had already seen her. “Hey, Beau!” she called out, waving ecstatically. When she raised her arm her turquoise skater dress rode up, showcasing further inches of smooth, sun-washed thigh. Beau averted her eyes to avoid having a gay aneurysm.

Her companion seemed less enthused. Beau kind of knew Fjord because his house was only about a block and a half away from hers, so their childhood hopscotch games had occasionally encountered zoning conflicts. Her mom said that the two of them had been friends as toddlers, although Beau had absolutely no recollection of that. Nowadays he was just sort of a non-entity in her life. They’d shared a math class last year but their seats were on opposite sides of the classroom. She sometimes passed him on his paper delivery bike route as she drove to volunteering. His signature was in two of her middle school yearbooks – he’d just written ‘H.A.G.S. Fjord’ both times. According to Beau’s mom, he was the varsity diving captain this year, which would probably be impressive if Beau gave a solitary fuck about intermural sports. He’d dyed his hair green and gotten one of his ears pierced last month, which was kind of cool. He and Jester were good friends for some reason.

He glanced up from his phone and waved half-heartedly in Beau’s direction. Then he noticed Caleb and straightened his spine slightly, pasting on a bland ‘varsity diving captain’ smile. Beau rolled her eyes.

“Hi… Jester. And…” Caleb stared questioningly at Fjord, whose Captain Smile faltered.

“Fjord,” he prompted. “We have AP Physics together…? We were lab partners in fall.”

“Oh,” Caleb said, like that was new information to him. Fjord looked vaguely crestfallen.

“Well, anyway,” Jester brightly interjected. “We just stopped by because we wanted to try the new Glitterpony Shake! And then you just happened to be here, Beau, which is such a lovely surprise!”

Beau wrinkled her nose. “Really? You want one of those?”

“Beauregard, we are supposed to be trying to get customers to buy things,” Caleb whispered.

“Why would I not? It’s so cute!” Jester says. “We want one of those in a size medium, and then we want a Magical Girl Smoothie!”

“What the fuck is a Magical Girl Smoothie?”

“Beauregard, language,” Caleb whispered.

“It’s from the Secret Menu!” Jester exclaimed. “Fjord, show them!”

Ruefully, Fjord held up his phone to display an image of a dessert drink with swirls of berry purple and banana yellow. “They’re both for her, really.”

“No, Fjord wanted the Glitterpony one. I just said it for him because he was too embarrassed. Oh – oops.” She grinned sheepishly, batting her eyelashes at him. She had very long, fluttery eyelashes. Beau felt lucky that grin wasn’t directed at her. (Or maybe a little unlucky.)

“I hate the Secret Menu,” Beau grumbled. “I never know how to make anything on there and then customers get pissed about it.”

Caleb shook his head placatingly. “Don’t worry, I routinely memorize the Secret Menu because I’m an employee who goes above and beyond –”

“Hey!”

“–who goes above and beyond, and so I’ll make that one, and you make the Glitterpony Shake – oh, by the way, because of corporate policy we have to mention that now that it’s June – stop rolling your eyes, Beauregard, it is very unprofessional – we are now offering the Glitterpony Pride Shake, which has –”

“Ooh, I want that!” Jester interrupted.

Beau sighed. Very heavily.

Jester and Fjord wandered down the world foods aisle while they waited for Beau and Caleb to make their drinks, ice-cold and topped with mountains of whipped cream (the Glitterpony Pride one with the pink kind it was supposed to have, because Caleb said they should be ‘nice’ to their ‘friends). Jester grabbed the Glitterpony Shake out of Fjord’s hand to take a sip of it. (Beau consciously avoided watching the way her lips pursed around the straw.)

“Oh my god, it reminds me so much of a Glitterpony!” Jester exclaimed.

“Yes, that is what it is,” Caleb reminded her.

“No, like an actual Glitterpony!”

Beau frowned. “There’s no such thing. Is there? What are you talking about?”

“I’m envisioning like, a sparkly unicorn,” Fjord mused. Jester pointed at him, nodding encouragingly.

“Unicorns… aren’t real,” Beau said.

Caleb’s lips twitched. “You sound very uncertain about that.”

After Fjord and Jester paid at the register, Fjord left a crumpled dollar bill in the tip jar and Jester leaned over the counter on her elbows, gesturing at Beau. “Come here!” she whispered.

“What?” Beau bent forward to hear better.

Instead of saying anything, Jester grabbed one of the straps of Beau’s apron and Beau lost her breath. What the fuck was happening! This was like something right out of her gaydreams!

And then Jester quickly clapped a hand onto her shoulder and Beau felt something heavier there. As Jester leaned away, grinning impishly, Beau picked at her shirtsleeve to examine it. It now sported a holographic sticker with a realistic line-art image of a penis and testicles. That was… baffling. Somehow, Beau would have been less surprised if Jester had just kissed her.

“What… is this?”

Jester tossed her hair, bell earrings jingling. “I made them! I’ve been putting them all over town! I wanted to put one on the counter, but then I thought you might get in trouble so I just put one on you instead. You’re welcome.”

Beau was still too confused to think about whether she was supposed to thank her. “Why are you putting them all over town?” asked Caleb, who’d apparently been watching the proceedings.

“Why not?”

Neither of them could argue with that.

As Jester vanished out the door in a waft of jasmine perfume, Caleb peered at the sticker to examine it more closely. “It’s a very nice drawing,” he said thoughtfully.

“I should take this off,” Beau said. “I don’t wanna just throw it away, though. I mean, it’s holographic.”

“You should put it on your binder. Or your thermos.”

Beau hummed noncommittally. She wasn’t sure what kind of message that would send about her personality, but it didn’t feel like a totally accurate one.

“I think it would impress her if you did.”

Beau squinted at him. His lips twitched. She squinted harder.

“Okay, what?” Beau huffed.

“What, what?” Caleb asked, feigning confusion.

“Stop being an ass! Tell me what you’re thinking!”

He smirked, smoothing his carrot-colored hair out of his face. “Nothing. It just seems like she has a crush on you, that’s all.”

Beau scoffed. “Uh, she definitely does not. She’s just, like, a weirdly effusive straight girl.”

He pursed his lips skeptically.

She glared at him. “Ugh, go check in the back to see if we have more Pride sprinkles,” she commanded, mostly because she was tired of looking at his freckled face.

After he left her alone in the coffee stand, she peeled the sticker off her sleeve and stuck it to the back of her phone case, staring at it for a moment. What a weird thing.

She smiled to herself.

&

Beau began playing the viola in fifth grade. Her parents had wanted her to learn a musical instrument in preparation for the competitive fine arts programs that started in middle school. She’d asked why she couldn’t just learn to sing or dance. (She didn’t want to learn to sing or dance, of course, but that was beside the point.)

She’d ended up choosing orchestra over band because sitting in a folding chair in the gym sounded a lot easier than marching around outside in a toy soldier costume. And then she picked the viola because it struck her as more ‘obscure and alternative’ than violin or cello, and at the time her elementary school didn’t have any double basses available to rent in her size. She didn’t hate it, really. She generally liked the pieces she played, and the viola section was assigned a harmonic role most of the time so ensemble music was less of a challenge than it likely would have been if she’d chosen violin. 

The fine arts programs in Cobalt-Soulle School District were highly competitive and ranking-oriented. Every two weeks, all the students participated in high-stress technical tests and their assigned seats were subsequently rearranged according to their scores as a method of both placing the best performers closer to the audience’s earshot and publicly shaming the worst performers. The elite members – the ‘inner circle’ of seat placements – possessed the most costly instruments, received lessons from the most prestigious private instructors, undertook the most daunting solo pieces. Every spring was ‘competition season’, when everybody – the inner circle as well as the slackers who consistently sat in the back row – piled into a janky school bus to drive for hours to state tournaments at high schools out in the middle of nowhere, where they would spend the day eating stale vending machine food, playing hangman on the back of their sheet music, anxiety-sweating through their starched button-downs in front of panels of stoic volunteer judges, losing their rosin in the cafeteria, and hopefully taking home a few trophies to add Cobalt High’s fine fine-arts reputation.

Of course, now that Beau was a senior, she was no longer too scared of her conductor to opt out of most of the competitions, and she’d also become savvy enough to persuade her parents that it was actually, somehow, better for her not to go to all of them (something about keeping oneself exclusive to heighten intrigue? or something?). And the biweekly placement tests were only high-stress if you cared about them, which Beau didn’t really, at this point. She once had, of course. When she was younger, physically and emotionally. When she’d believed that school was the alpha and omega of her entire life.

But then as time went on her perspective changed. She almost lost Molly, and the gravity of that event made things like her orchestra seat placement feel insignificant by comparison. Growing up had changed her attitude, too. After reaching an age when she no longer took her parents’ word as gospel and in fact began to recognize and resent their numerous shortcomings, she lost her blind faith that adults were always experts on whatever they were talking about and never had an agenda beyond her best interests. Or maybe that wasn’t just about growing up – maybe that was about the specific set of parents she’d grown up with, too.

She was a passably good violist, even without private lessons or an expensive instrument or a pedigree of trophies earned later than junior year. Her technique was decent enough, even if her bowing was a bit off sometimes and the most complicated solo pieces she played these days were arrangements of pop songs that she learned mainly for the purpose of entertaining Molly.

And fortunately for her, unlike the high-strung (literally) violin section, the viola section was a haven for slackers, stoners, eccentrics, artsy types, queer kids, goths, people who were only in orchestra because their parents had forced them, and people who were only in orchestra because their favorite anime character played violin.

People like Caduceus, who was somehow consistently an inner circle member despite not sharing literally any of the traits that typically defined inner circle members. He didn’t even wear a tie to concerts, unless you counted bolo ties with weird oversized gems on them. His viola had a matte rose-pink varnish, which theoretically could’ve messed with the sound quality but it sounded perfectly fine to Beau. He could never remember the names of even the most well-known composers, instead referring to them all as ‘the guy who drank a lot of absinthe’ and ‘mister pretty boy’. Beau absolutely idolized him.

Fridays were sectional days, which meant that each instrument section was cordoned off into a discrete area of the fine arts building to practice as a smaller group. The violas were usually sent to the lobby, which was meant to be a punishment for their failure to ever accomplish much of anything on sectional days, but actually functioned as a great opportunity for most of them to sneak out of the building and drive to the strip mall to buy donuts. This had been happening even more than usual now that competition season was over and so was the school year itself, for the most part.

Beau could definitely understand. It was hard to convince herself that high school was important when she knew that in just a few short months she’d be off to a newer, bigger city and a newer, bigger phase of her life. It was especially hard on a Friday like today, when the air outside the glass lobby doors hummed with buttery sunlight and birdsong.

“We’re not doing anything today, right Caduceus?” Beau groaned, slumping in her folding chair.

“Do we ever?” Caduceus asked lightly. As the person currently placed in first chair, it was technically his responsibility to plan and oversee sectional time, but he tended to take a… hands-off approach to his role.

“I feel like we should do something today… I mean, it’s one of our last sectionals before summer… and it’s one of you guys’ last sectionals ever…” one of the freshmen hesitantly pointed out.

“Oh, shut up, Howard.”

Caduceus pointedly cleared his throat. “What Beau means to say is that you can use this time how you want, Howard. Feel free to practice if that feels right in your heart.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me what to practice?” Howard asked.

“Howard, if you pitch in a dollar, we’ll bring you back a donut,” said one of the juniors – Sky – pulling their car keys out of their pocket.

“Oh, I want a donut!” Beau yelled. “Actually I want two! Hang on, lemme see if I have cash…”

Most of the viola section ended up piling into Sky’s car to accompany them to the donut place. The donut place had a somewhat dingy atmosphere, but anything was better than the monotony of being on campus. Unless you were a senior like Beau, and most of the restaurants and stores at the local strip mall had faded into monotony from overexposure. Even the idea of ditching class to go to the donut place didn’t excite her anymore – maybe that was the truest sign that she was finally done with high school.

Beau picked up her viola and fit it under her chin, still in her slouched position, and casually played the melody to ‘Friday I’m in Love’. She was learning it for Molly’s birthday because she’d noticed it was on his ‘summery bopz’ playlist.

Caduceus hummed along, swaying to the beat. His rose-pink hair glowed hazily in the sunbeams that shone through the window. He was wearing a loosely knitted cardigan festooned with tassels; Molly would probably beg him to let him borrow it.

“It’s Friday,” Caduceus remarked. “Are you in love?”

“I don’t think so,” Beau said mournfully. “I’ve never even had a girlfriend.”

“Me neither.”

“What about a boyfriend?” (Caduceus was pan, as far as she knew.)

He hummed thoughtfully. “A long time ago me and another little boy got married on the playground. We’re still married, I suppose. Maybe I should send him a letter.”

“Do you know who he is? Or if he’s still around?”

“No, I don’t remember. That will probably make it hard to send him a letter.”

“Yeah. Pretty hard, I would imagine.” Beau carefully set her viola on the tiled floor, leaving her bow on a music stand. “Okay, so I’m not in love, I don’t think. But there is – a girl.”

Caduceus nodded, cork earrings swaying. (Actual wine corks – he must’ve made them himself.) “Jester?”

“Jester – no. What? Why would you think that? She’s not even, like, gay or bi or anything, I don’t think.”

“You have her sticker on your viola case.”

“Oh, right.” Beau’s viola case was her depository for stickers that she got for free and didn’t know what to do with. It had become something of a mobile billboard for every corporation and charity organization that had ever given out promotional merch at a career fair. “Didn’t she give those to, like, everyone?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess so. I don’t know why I thought that you liked her.”

“I do like her. Just – not like that. I mean, she’s like, pretty and cute or whatever. But she’s straight. I have a policy about not crushing on straight girls if I can avoid it.”

“Is she actually?”

“Yeah, I remember her talking about it in, like, sophomore year.”

Caduceus shrugged. “That’s a long time ago. People change their minds.”

She frowned. “People don’t change their minds about being straight – I don’t think that’s how that works.”

“Well, not change their mind, maybe… more like just realizing something.”

“Well, if she’s realized that she’s not straight, I haven’t heard anything about it,” Beau said, digging in her jacket pocket for her gum. “Want gum? I only have one stick left but we can split it.”

“Oh, thank you,” Caduceus said blithely, holding out his hand.

She handed him his half of the gum. “Wait, do you just like, think every straight person is eventually going to realize they’re not straight?”

“It would make sense.”

“Would it? I mean, I feel like a lot of people are actually just straight. Disappointing as it is.”

Caduceus twisted his mouth skeptically. “Maybe.”

She laughed. “You’re a card, Caduceus. Anyway, the girl I was talking about is this girl from my work. She’s so fuckin’ cool, like she has long black hair that’s white at the ends, and she’s super tall and strong, and she’s only eighteen but she has tattoos –”

“Is she straight?”

“…No? I don’t… think so? I mean, she’s never actually said what her sexuality is, but like, c’mon dude, she has tattoos –”

“Straight girls have tattoos sometimes…”

“Well, sure but – wait, weren’t you just saying that you’re pretty sure almost nobody is actually straight? Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“Why don’t you just ask her if she’s straight?”

Beau scoffed. “Okay, I can’t just, like, ask that. Then it would be so obvious that I’m into her.”

Caduceus shrugged. “…So?”

“So! That’s embarrassing. I can’t just make it that obvious. I have to be more subtle.”

“…Why?”

“Because! Of like, anxiety! Or whatever!”

Caduceus stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Huh.”

There was a pause. “Aren’t seniors supposed to be, like, mature? Why don’t you just ask her out?”

Beau jumped. She hadn’t realized that one of the freshmen hadn’t gone with Sky and had instead just been sitting there, ten feet away, listening to their entire conversation.

“Jaden! Why didn’t you go with Sky and everybody else?”

“Because I don’t want to get in trouble!”

“Punishment is arbitrary and meaningless!”

Caduceus spread his hands. “Now, why don’t we all settle down and enjoy a nice moment of peace and quiet?”

“We’re in orchestra, it’s not supposed to be quiet…”

“Oh, take a goddamn chill pill, Jaden,” Beau mumbled. She let her eyes fall shut, soaking in the warm sun on her face. Maybe there were some areas of her life where she could take a goddamn chill pill, too.

&

The parking lot outside Save-Mart was almost unbearably bright on afternoons like this, with the shiny cars flashing in the hot sun and the sizzling pavement and the vast, empty sky, pure and washed-out overexposed blue. Yasha’s skin and hair and black work uniform were washed-out and overexposed too as she squinted in the light.

“You done for the day?” Beau asked, pretending to be casual.

Yasha nodded, finishing a text message and sliding her phone in her pocket. “Yeah. My uncle picks me up. I’m just waiting for him.”

Beau felt sweaty. It was probably because of the sun. Or because of this conversation. “Oh, I – I mean, I can drive. So I could, like. Give you rides home. And shit.” She hurriedly fixed her gaze on her clunky work shoes.

“Oh – that’s very nice of you,” she heard Yasha say. (She still wasn’t looking at her.) “But I don’t think our shifts usually end at the same time. And my uncle doesn’t mind, anyway.”

Beau glanced up. She still felt nervous as hell, so she focused on the makeup smudges under Yasha’s eyes instead of her eyes themselves. “Gotcha. So, do you live with him or something?” (She heard Caleb’s voice in her head – ‘you’re very nosy, aren’t you?’ – and internally winced.)

Yasha nodded again. “For the time being. I’ve been staying with him since I left Morocco. I’m looking for my own home, though, once I save enough money.”

‘Why did you leave Morocco?’ Beau didn’t ask. Stop being nosy, she admonished herself. People will tell you want they want to tell you!

“You’re wondering why I left Morocco.” There was a playful smile on her lips.

Beau scoffed. “Um – no. I mean – you don’t have to tell me. It’s – whatever, I don’t –”

Yasha laughed slightly. “It’s okay. I would wonder the same thing.” And then she paused, and a shadow passed over her face. Not a literal shadow – it was still uncomfortably bright outside. More of an emotional shadow. “There were some… things. That happened.”

Beau was silent for a moment, waiting for her to elaborate. She didn’t. “…Okay?”

She sighed softly. “I’m sorry for my vagueness… there was a sort of… conflict, I suppose. With my parents. And my mother wanted me to stay home and figure it out, but I knew what she wanted from me and I knew I couldn’t compromise for her, and so I left to stay with my uncle here in the states. Well, he’s not my uncle, biologically – he’s like a third cousin or something. And I’ve been staying in his house until I can figure out something more permanent.”

“Oh.” Beau could tell she was deliberately leaving out some key details, and she really wanted to know more but she also didn’t want to interrogate her coworker in the Save-Mart parking lot at four pm. “Do you… like, are you planning on going back to Morocco?”

Yasha bit her lip. “I don’t know. That’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately.”

Beau wasn’t sure what to say. A car alarm went off across the parking lot. “Well,” Beau began. “I’m enjoying getting to know you better.”

Yasha huffed another soft laugh. “And I you.”

“’And I you’ – your English is very good, you know that?”

“Thank you. I’ve been learning it since I was very young. And my girlfriend tutored English –” She broke off, blushing. “I mean, ah.” She stared at Beau, eyes wide and nervous.

Beau’s heart pounded to the beat of her gay brain chanting ‘yes! yes! yes! yes! yes!’ “Oh, that’s – cool! Gay people are – I’m also, like. Gay. Just so you know.” She cleared her throat. Goddammit, why was she always so awkward?

Yasha looked relieved. “Oh, good. Thank you – I mean. Well, anyway.”

And then Beau fully absorbed what Yasha had actually said. “Girlfriend? You have a – oh. That’s cool.” Her heart sank like a rock in water.

“Well… not anymore. She, ah – we’re not. Together anymore.”

The atmosphere noticeably shifted. Yasha’s expression hadn’t changed, but there was something sad in her eyes.

“…Oh.”

The car alarm continued to wail in the distance.

Beau glanced at her watch. “Oh shit, I have to go to volunteering, like, now.” She looked up at Yasha. “But wait – let’s talk more later. Do you – I mean, would you wanna like – exchange phone numbers?”

Yasha didn’t say anything for a painfully long moment. Beau contemplated would it feel like to be suddenly struck by lightning. And then Yasha smiled, softly. “Yeah,” she said. “That would be okay.”

They exchanged phone numbers. And Beau walked over to her car, trying not to breathe too heavily. And then she sat down in the driver’s seat, checked out the window to make sure Yasha was far away, and then screamed her heart out.

She’d gotten! A girl’s! Number!

&

Beau slept through through most of her graduation ceremony. The principal’s speech was just as boring as every speech the principal had ever made – she figured the school was trying to punish her one last time by making her listen to it. Well, screw that. If high school had taught her one thing, it was how to fall asleep almost instantly under any circumstances.

Caleb was also somehow the valedictorian even though he’d only finished two years at this school. Beau didn’t know how that was possible. The school had probably accidentally given him too many credits for his classes back in Germany – it would make sense, considering the administrative competency level she’d observed during her time at Cobalt High. Or maybe Caleb was just really smart ‘in the school way,’ as Molly would say. She supposed he WAS a mega-nerd.

His speech was kind of boring, too. He just talked about how everyone in America had been kind to him, and how international cooperation was, like, important or whatever. (She wasn’t really listening that closely.) Molly seemed to be paying rapt attention, though, when she spotted him in the back row. She tried to stick her tongue out at him but then stopped because he wasn’t looking at her and also because it occurred to her that everyone could see her being weird.

She fell asleep again when they started calling everyone to come up and get their diplomas – there were five hundred people in her graduating class, after all. She only returned to consciousness when Jester shook her awake, leaning across the laps of three other people in their alphabetically organized row (Lavorre and Lionett).

“Beau! We have to go up there now!” she hissed.

Beau groaned, blinking awake. “Do we actually have to?”

Jester didn’t dignify that with an answer, which was fair.

Beau’s parents met with her after the ceremony for the obligatory photos and to trade out her diploma for a grocery-store bouquet. It took her nearly half an hour to even find them – the hallway outside the auditorium was completely packed with high school students (former high school students) in matching blue robes and mortarboards milling around the floor either yelling the names of family members or trailing a slow-moving caravan of flower-bearing relatives behind them. Beau’s extended family wasn’t here. Most of them lived in different states or countries, and Beau wasn’t enough of a prodigy to warrant a hundred-plus-mile trek. They would just wait for the chain email with an image of her standing stiffly between her mother and father, finally matching her mother’s height now that they were both in heels.

Beau disliked walking in heels. They rubbed her Achilles tendon raw and sliced her speed in half. And she didn’t like how her hair looked right now, either. Her mom had insisted she curl it for the ‘special occasion,’ but Beau refused any help because she didn’t want her mom to notice her undercut. She curled it herself, but she wasn’t very good at it so it had taken three times as long and some of the curls looked awkward or limp or seemed to be somehow facing the wrong direction. She also hadn’t remembered that curling her hair would make it appear shorter – it still just barely covered the shaven part of her head but she’d been sweating through her dress throughout the family photoshoot, terrified that one of her parents would look just a bit too closely at the back of her neck.

She’d gotten out of there as fast as possible by insisting that she needed to take photos with Molly. She did want to take photos with Molly, anyway, but it was also an excuse for escape. Her parents had offered to go with her, but she’d disappeared into the crowd before they even finished asking. (She could tell they didn’t really want to, anyway.)

Cell service was spotty in the local sports center where the grad ceremony had taken place, and Molly only answered his phone intermittently to begin with, so she resigned herself to another half-hour of pushing between sweaty blue-robed bodies and accidentally walking through group photoshoots.

As she wandered through the noisy crowd, as fast as she could in her heels and much faster than she needed to be going when she had no specific destination in mind, she was surprised to feel a lump rising in her throat. Why was she about to cry? What was there to cry about? She didn’t think she was sad – or was she?

She’d been mentally packing her bags and moving out of Cobalt High for months – maybe almost since she first arrived. And so her official exit was a whole lot of Nothing – just her body following where her mind had already gone. So she didn’t think she was sad about that. She already knew she would never go to that godforsaken school again. She’d been thinking about it, dreaming about it. She hated it there. But maybe… you didn’t have to love something to miss it. Maybe you could miss hating something. Maybe you could miss feeling anything about it.

And maybe she also felt terribly alone in this mass of people. Her parents were gone somewhere, not that she ever usually felt relaxed or at peace around them. And Molly was nowhere to be found. He was her anchor, really – without him she was desperately unmoored in this sea of faces who’d known her for years and yet didn’t know her at all. It was sort of a weird allegory for how she’d felt over the last four years. Alone in a crowd, metaphorically. Now she was alone in a crowd, literally. She’d always prided herself on being unique and independent. A lone wolf. She didn’t need to fit in with the popular kids, she didn’t need to trust the authority figures, she didn’t even need anyone at all but herself and her best friend.

But the truth was… it sucked being alone. It hurt. It was a slow hurt, a four-year-long hurt. Maybe even a lifelong hurt. And she wanted it to be over, so badly, and she was so afraid that it would never really be over.

She’d flourish in college. That was what she kept telling herself. It would all be worth it, eventually.

But there was a part of her, a little girl inside her heart, who wished high school could’ve been different. Easier. It seemed like it should be a righteously angry feeling, but really it was just a sad one. Every day fourteen-year-old Beau arrived for the first day of her freshman year and every day eighteen-year-old Beau wished she could go back in time and tell her how hard it was going to be.

Her reverie was interrupted by someone’s hand – a bizarrely strong hand – grabbing her shoulder. “Beau!” someone yelled over the din of the crowd.

Beau spun around to see Jester grinning excitedly, dark lipstick stretched around white teeth. “Hey! Will you take a photo with me?”

Beau craned her neck to see over Jester’s shoulder. Her mother – presumably her mother, based on the facial resemblance – stood there holding a very professional-looking camera, lustrous wine-red curls swept over one shoulder, body voluptuous in a form-fitting red cocktail dress. She smiled sweetly at Beau – she and Jester were wearing the same lipstick, it looked like. Beau reminded herself to text Molly once she had service again: ‘Jester’s mom is a total milf!!!’

“Yeah, of course, Jester.” Beau slung an arm around Jester, maneuvering her so they were standing parallel, facing Mrs. Lavorre. Jester leaned into Beau, tucking her head against Beau’s shoulder (she was just the right height for that). She smelled like jasmine. It was kind of nice being this close. And kind of unexpected – she hadn’t realized Jester cared about her all that much.

“Oh, you girls are so cute! But here, stand more like this, so you’re in the light –” Jester’s mom patted their arms with long-nailed hands, arranging them at a different angle. “And hold your flowers up! They’re so pretty!”

Beau glanced down at the bouquet from her parents, which she’d just been hanging limply at her side. “Here, let’s cheers our bouquets!” Jester suggested excitedly. She held up her bundle of pink-and-gold roses.

“Okay,” Beau chuckled, lifting her bouquet and ‘clinking’ it with Jester’s like an enormous, awkwardly shaped drink.

A sunbeam poured like honey over the side of Jester’s face, catching her diamond earrings and sending tiny speckles of rainbow light here and there – Jester’s collarbone, Beau’s wrist, a peach-colored rose petal. Jester met Beau’s eyes and winked before looking back at her mother. Beau felt herself smiling before Mrs. Lavorre even told her to.

After her second (and much less stressful) photoshoot, Beau continued her search for Molly. She felt much calmer now. Maybe it was the scent of jasmine still wafting from the shoulder of her robe. She spotted Caleb taking photos in the lobby with his host family. He was crouching down, pieces of red hair falling in his face, so that his much-shorter host sister could stand behind him and hold two fingers over his head. Nott – that was her name. She remembered Caleb talking about her.

Maybe Caleb sort of… was her friend. At this point. Against her will. He caught her eye and quirked a faint smile. She gave a slight wave back. She watched him for a little longer, laughing as his sister attempted to steal his mortarboard. He wasn’t a bad person at all, was he? He was actually really nice. (She admitted this very begrudgingly.)

At that moment, her phone pinged with a text from Molly. ‘Still with fam, meet u by the ugly sculpture out front in 10-15 min’

She sent a text to her parents letting them know when she needed a ride home. She decided to just tell them she was already with Molly, and his family wanted her to take pictures with them. A skill – or habit, maybe, was a better word – she’d developed growing up with her parents was innately knowing how and when to drop casual, low-stakes lies about her whereabouts and daily goings-on. It wasn’t that she necessarily thought she would get in trouble for telling the truth, or that she thought the lie would make her parents happy. It was just that the lie was less likely to prompt accusatory and emotionally draining follow-up questions. If she said she was still waiting for Molly, that might be an invitation for criticism of her inefficiency or a demand for her exact location or even a snide remark about how Molly was a ‘flaky friend.’ However, if she said she was with him and his family, they (hopefully) wouldn’t have an untoward reaction. It was always a gamble, of course. Sometimes they were just in a bad mood and would have an untoward reaction to just about anything.

Part of it was also that if any situation wasn’t proceeding in a totally ideal manner, her parents would find a way to blame Beau for it. Either she’d directly caused the problem, or she hadn’t been prudent enough to foresee it and adequately prepare for it, or she wasn’t working hard enough to fix it. This narrative had become so ingrained in her head by the age of eighteen that she’d gotten used to relaying events – even events as seemingly innocuous as looking for a friend after her high school grad ceremony – in a way that painted her innocent. Pure-intentioned. Blameless. It wasn’t that she really thought she was blameless. It was that she knew she was never blameless, and she would rather not hear it from her parents because she was already hearing it from herself, in their voices.

She meandered outside to sit next to the so-called ugly sculpture while she waited for Molly. It was magic hour – the sun splashed golden light on west-facing trees and buildings and hillsides, strangely juxtaposed against the backdrop of a rain-dark eastern sky. It would rain heavily tonight, she could already tell.

It was still hot now, though. She sat on a low stone wall, bending over to pick at the weeds growing from cracks in the pavement. It was mostly empty out here, although she could still hear the distant din of the crowds inside.

She enjoyed the quiet. It made her quieter internally, too. She felt calmer now, about graduating. A little sad still, maybe, but more of a patient mourning than a swelling in her trachea.

She wanted to go back in time and give her fourteen-year-old self a hug. And she wanted to tell her everything was going to be okay, even though she knew it wouldn’t.

But it still could, maybe. In the future. Now that she was a real grown-up. Up until now, every aspect of her life had been controlled by seemingly everybody except herself. But now, maybe, she might have enough agency to build the life she really wanted. Everything was going to be okay because she was going to make it okay. She owed that to fourteen-year-old Beau.

On a whim, she took her phone out of her robe pocket and scrolled through her contacts, finding ‘Yasha’ at the very bottom. No profile picture yet. Not even a last name. But maybe there would be. Someday. Later. Soon.

Taking a deep breath, she tapped ‘Send Message’ and typed out, ‘hey, what are u up to?’

And then she rapidly shoved her phone back in her pocket and lowered her face in her hands, heart pounding in her throat. A boring first message, sure. But a first message! She’d done it! And now she would just ignore her phone for the rest of the day because she was too scared to see what Yasha would say in reply. (Baby steps…)

After a minute or two of waiting for her heart rate to slow, she exhaled and raised her head again. It was even quieter now – people were starting to leave. And she felt quieter too. Not sad at all, weirdly enough. She was okay.

Things would be okay this summer. Maybe even better than okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone is wondering, rosin is a little cake of, like, hardened tree sap that stringed instrument players rub on their bows to keep them in good condition. Weird, I know
> 
> Thank you for reading! Hope you're doing well <3


	3. July

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey hope your day is going ok! <3
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter, divided by scene (new scenes are indicated by the & symbol)  
> \- Second scene: troubled parent-child dynamics, underage drinking  
> \- Third scene: mild discussion of gender dysphoria
> 
> I will include a summary of the second and third scenes in the endnotes if you want to avoid these topics or know more context before you read! Stay safe <3

Beau generally didn’t like working late shifts, but they were better when she could time her break so she could watch the sunset (a little after nine pm, at this time of year).

The back parking lot had the best view, especially if she climbed up on top of one of the dumpsters. Sure it didn’t smell great, and sure she’d scuffed her work shoes multiple times, but that coral-and-amber-and-lavender-painted sky was the most beautiful thing she ever saw at Save-Mart.

Well. The second most beautiful thing.

“Hey. I thought I might find you out here,” Yasha said.

Beau startled, shoes sliding on the metal dumpster lid. “Oh, hey! Um – why would you think that?”

Yasha smiled. The white parts of her hair were golden in this light, and her dark tattoo looked almost blue. “I asked if you were on break. Caleb says you like to watch the sunset.”

The sun hadn’t totally gone down yet – it still hovered, copper-bright, above the distant hilly horizon. “I do.”

“I do too. And this is the best place to do it.”

Yasha climbed up onto the dumpster as well, dropping into a seated position next to Beau. She turned and smiled at her. “I’m impressed you figured that out as well.”

Beau’s chest warmed and she lowered her face, smiling too. Yasha was impressed by her! (For something really small.) (But it still counted.) “Wanna watch it with me?” she asked.

Yasha nodded. Beau scooted slightly closer to her.

They’d been texting a little bit on and off over the past couple of weeks. Yasha didn’t seem like a particularly texting-oriented person, which was actually fine because Beau wasn’t really either – it had mainly just been an excuse to augment her interactions with Yasha. But that ended up working out either way, because in the last two weeks at work it definitely seemed like Yasha had been… seeking her out more. Like exchanging phone numbers had unlocked some kind of door between them. (Not… opened the door, completely.) (But it wasn’t locked anymore.)

“How has your shift been?” Yasha asked politely.

Beau shrugged. “Terrible. But, like, normal-terrible. Fine-terrible. You?”

Yasha laughed softly, murmuring ‘fine-terrible’. “The same, I think.”

“That’s Save-Mart.”

“That’s Save-Mart.”

“What are you doing after work?”

“Sleep.”

Beau snorted.

“And I…” Yasha sighed. “I think my mother wants to call me.”

Beau raised her eyebrows. “…Yeah?”

Yasha folded her elbows over her knees, staring out at the hazy pink sky. “She wants me to come home. But I’m not ready to come home. And I also… don’t even want to think about home at all. Right now.”

Beau nodded wordlessly.

They watched the light fade to blue. The sky to the south was empty and clear, but a dark swath of clouds roiled in the north – there might be a summer storm tonight, Beau thought.

“…Well,” Beau said slowly. “You know what I’m thinking?”

Yasha’s lips twitched. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking we could both use a donut right now.”

Yasha bit her lip, grinning. “I am in agreement with that.”

Beau glanced at her watch. “We have fifteen minutes left of break. And I think if we start walking right now we can get from here to the donut place and back. How much change do you have on you?”

“…Nothing.”

Yasha cast her eyes down and Beau hurriedly patted her on the shoulder. “Hey, no worries! I’ll spot you. C’mon, let’s go.”

Yasha glanced up again, smiling shyly at Beau through her long eyelashes. Beau couldn’t help but grin, chest blooming with warmth. There was nothing like the rush of making a pretty girl smile. And she’d also been dreaming about buying food for a pretty girl for years – it was a minor and silly thing, sure, but it was one of the little ‘courtship’ things that straight boys started doing in their adolescent years and that she yearned to do, too. There was a sort of old-fashioned spirit in her that ached to be the handsome romantic lead in an unrealistic movie.

Beau jumped down from the dumpster, shoes colliding percussively with the pavement, and then reached up to help Yasha climb to the ground more gracefully. She thought about holding onto Yasha’s hand, but then she chickened out and let go of it, shoving both of her own hands in her apron pockets.

She spun around and walked backwards, smirking at Yasha. “Let’s go!” she said again.

Yasha smiled again.

They walked away across the parking lot, in the direction of the stormclouds.

As they strolled in silence, something occurred to Beau. She took off her visor, shoving it in her apron pocket, and then pulled a hair tie off her wrist and gathered her top hair up in a bun. The breeze was cool over the shaven part of her head.

“Whoa, your hair is cool…” Yasha commented.

Beau grinned. “Thanks.” (Mission accomplished.)

&

Beau should’ve known.

She should’ve known her parents would find her report card – she was the one to blame, really. She’d thought that as long as she was carefully cagey about telling them how to access the online grade matrix, and if she studiously volunteered to collect the mail every day so she could intercept any postage from the school before it reached their hands, everything would be fine. They would never have to know about the drop in her GPA this semester – because, honestly, she’d already been accepted into college, and as long as she didn’t let her scores dip low enough that the local state university would actually rescind her acceptance, she’d be fine, right? She just wanted to… live a little. Just for one semester. Not take everything so seriously. Well – she’d never really taken it seriously, in her heart of hearts, but every semester she went through the motions, making sacrifices to a spirit she didn’t totally believe in, building her life day by day in a pattern that would please her parents but this semester, just this last semester, she’d wanted to breathe.

Of course, it was hard to achieve straight A’s in five AP classes while also breathing. But she’d thought it wouldn’t matter. And for a while, it hadn’t. She’d secreted away her report card as soon as it arrived in the mail, keeping it hidden at the bottom of her underwear drawer, folded inside the cup of one of the lacy feminine bras she never wore. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t just destroyed it – maybe there was some part of her that subconsciously believed she deserved to be punished. Or at least deserved to keep the evidence of her failure around so she wouldn’t be able to erase it from her life completely.

It was so well hidden, though, that she herself even forgot about it. Which is why it meant nothing to her when her mom casually mentioned that she was going to clean Beau’s room this weekend. Okay, whatever. Her mom liked to clean her room sometimes and put everything back in different locations when she was done. It was a little bit of a nuisance and a little bit more of a violation of privacy, but trying to negotiate around it only ever resulted in a blowout fight so Beau had learned to just live with it. It wasn’t like she had anything to hide, usually. (Except for now.)

Obviously, her mom had almost immediately found the report card. And obviously she’d marched downstairs, paper crackling in her clenching fist, expression livid. And obviously she’d then shown it to Beau’s dad, and he’d gotten angry as well, in a quieter way that was equally scary for different reasons. And then, obviously obviously obviously, there’d been crying and screaming and vitriol slung in both directions until Beau was definitely definitely definitely grounded, which she’d known would happen as soon as her mom came downstairs but now it had been confirmed in an ominously quiet pronouncement from her father.

And so she’d spent some time in her room, sprawled on the floor, crying with her face buried in a pile of the clothes her mom had haphazardly torn out of her dresser, so that her parents wouldn’t be able to hear that she was still upset. She was eighteen! It was stupid to care what her parents thought! This was what she told herself as she unlocked her window, heart pounding, and kicked off her socks so she’d have better traction as she crawled out onto the sloping roof below her window and then shimmied down the gutter to the backyard below – first listening closely to which air vent her parents’ voices were coming from so she could time her escape for a moment when neither of them were near a backyard-facing window.

Even though the night was pitch-dark except for the amber glow of streetlights and distant blue pinpricks of stars, the air was summer-balmy – it didn’t even matter that she hadn’t brought a jacket or shoes.

She was only wearing a loose t-shirt and pajama shorts that she kept nervously yanking down because they revealed a lot more leg than she was used to showcasing outside the house. Not that it mattered, because no one was out at this hour in the suburbs. The trees shook softly in the breeze. Flyaway strands of hair lifted away from Beau’s sweaty face, and she took a deep inhale and exhale, feeling the tear tracks cool and dry on her cheeks.

It was so quiet out here. And dark. She was a few blocks away from her house now – she didn’t walk through this part of the neighborhood very often, but she knew it lay near the edge of the local wetland preserve. She decided to head that way. These silent houses were making her paranoid. She wished she would’ve thought to bring her phone so she could listen to music but she’d left it charging in her room. Which was probably for the best, because there was a ninety percent chance she would’ve dropped it while climbing down to the backyard.

The asphalt was rough under the soles of her feet, so it was a relief to reach cool, slightly damp grass. Out here by the woods, the wind in the trees was louder, almost a soft roar. She could hear the frogs too, croaking rhythmically and soporifically like a rustic lullaby.

There was a chain-link fence that separated this housing development from the adjacent wilderness, but Beau had climbed it hundreds of times in her life. Landing on the ground on the other side was a bit less comfortable without shoes, but the ground was waterlogged and springy here. She examined the flecks of mud that had splattered onto her ankles and shins. She’d definitely have to take a shower… later. (She didn’t want to think about home right now.)

She didn’t necessarily want to wander deep into the woods, especially in her current state of dress, but she found a fallen tree dipping halfway into the slough where she could sit in earthy-smelling darkness and pretend she was a little farther away from civilization. Inexpertly dodging thorny vines and poking branches, she scooted along the mossy wood until she could dangle her legs above the dark, still water. She could hear a frog eerily close by.

She could also hear… a rustling, like the sound of a person moving around in the bushes. Oh god. Oh fuck. Was she about to get killed and have her corpse deposited in the slough? She should’ve just stayed in her room and accepted her punishment!

A dark figure emerged from the undergrowth, clambering onto the nova of unearthed roots at the base of the tree trunk Beau was sitting on. Heart in her throat, Beau reflexively scrambled to get away, bare feet sliding on the damp moss. And then her heart leapt higher into her throat for a different reason, which was that she’d lost her balance and was about to fall into the swamp.

Before she could even scream, a strong hand grabbed her by the arm, pulling her back onto the log. “Oh my god, are you okay?” said a familiar voice.

Beau strained her eyes in the darkness, trying to place who it was. And then she automatically shrunk back, squinting, because the person turned on their phone flashlight and drenched her in brilliant white.

Okay, so it wasn’t actually that bright. Her eyes just needed to adjust. “Oh my god, that’s so fucking bright, turn that off,” she snapped.

“I needed it to find my footing!” said Fjord – because for some unfathomable reason, he was here in the woods with her in the middle of the night. The phone light washed out the planes of his face, rendering him an overexposed photograph, hazel eyes unnaturally pale. And then he switched the light off and they were both plunged into shadow again. (Much darker shadow than before, because Beau’s eyes needed to adjust again.)

“What are you doing out here?” Beau asked.

Fjord snorted. “I could ask you the same thing.”

She stared at him. She still couldn’t see in the dark well enough to make out the details of his appearance, but in the brief moment when he’d been washed in light she’d noticed his hair looked uncharacteristically unkempt and he was dressed in an unzipped hoodie over a loose t-shirt and jogging shorts – not dissimilar to her own current ensemble.

They weren’t friends. They barely knew each other, really. But she felt a funny sort of kinship with him, in this moment. She couldn’t exactly name the emotion that had led her to this suburban wetland preserve at this hour, but she had a sense that Fjord had been driven by the same thing.

He heaved into a seated position next to her, letting his legs dangle next to hers. “I guess I come out here when I feel like I’m going fucking crazy,” he said, voice even.

It was an odd thing to say to someone you didn’t know very well. But it also felt like maybe social barriers and boundaries stopped existing beyond where the light from the streetlamps could illuminate. Or maybe they just stopped existing when the line between night and morning grew blurry.

“I get that,” she said. She thought about elaborating, and then didn’t. She exhaled deeply. The frogs croaked.

Fjord slid something out of his hoodie pocket – she thought he was taking out his phone again, but the object was slightly the wrong shape and size. She realized it was a flask. She raised her eyebrows.

He noticed her looking and lifted it. “Do you want some?”

“What do you have in there?”

He shrugged. “Just vodka. My parents don’t notice if I take it out of the bottle a little at a time.”

He took a deep swallow – probably the equivalent of a shot – and held it out for her. She hesitated a moment, and then took it. She’d never had any alcohol, beyond sips of wine at dinner parties when she was a kid and that time she’d slept over at Molly’s and his foster mom let them add just a taste of white rum to their homemade mostly-virgin daiquiris. But now was as good a time as any to try it for real, right? This night was already weird enough.

She took a short sip and immediately scrunched up her face in disgust. It tasted like lighter fluid – she could feel it burning her sinuses. Fjord chuckled. “I guess you don’t drink straight vodka much, huh?”

“Shut up, I’m hardcore,” she said, and then knocked it back, gulping down what was probably more than a shot. And then she quickly handed him back the flask, face pinched in displeasure. Her throat was on fire and her mouth tasted like it had been coated in nail polish remover. “Okay but like… why don’t you cut it with, like, orange juice or something?”

“‘Cause then I couldn’t fit as much of it in the flask.”

“That’s… fair, I guess.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Beau waited for the vodka to kick in. It would probably take longer than, like, thirty seconds, to be fair. (Maybe?) (She felt like she knew nothing about this.)

Neither of them said anything at all for quite a while. They just sat on the log and listened to the sounds of the forest at night. It had the potential to be awkward, but Beau didn’t feel that way. Conversation seemed unnecessary right now.

Eventually, Fjord asked, “Can I tell you something I’ve never told anyone?”

Beau arched an eyebrow. This might as well happen, too.

“Sure.”

For a while he didn’t speak, and she thought he might’ve changed his mind. And then he said, “I like guys.”

“…Oh.”

“Like… sexually.”

“Uh-huh.”

They were quiet again, listening to the chorus of frogs.

“I like girls. Like, sexually,” Beau said.

“I kind of knew that, I think.”

She snorted. “Yeah. I guess it’s kind of obvious, a bit.”

He chuckled. “A bit.”

Another pause.

“Sooo… any guys you have your eye on?”

He took another sip from his flask. “I mean… I wanna be out when I go to college. But obviously, like… no one from high school knows. Except you, I guess.”

“C’mon, there must’ve been, like, one person you thought was cute.”

He bent his head down. It was dark, but she could barely see him grinning. “I guess… Caleb’s kinda cute.”

She scoffed incredulously. “Caleb? Really? Why does, like, everybody have a crush on him? He’s like, the opposite of a catch. One time he told me he uses hand soap to wash his hair.”

Fjord chuckled harder. “God, really?”

“Yeah. I think you could do a lot better.”

“I also kinda liked… Caduceus.”

“Now, that’s a good choice. I can get on board with that.”

“I think he and I got married, actually, when we were, like, five.”

“Really? That’s sweet. And gay.”

He laughed. “I know.”

“Wait, so… do you not like him anymore?”

“I mean… we graduated. I don’t think I’m gonna see him again.”

“Like… you could see him again.”

He sighed. “I’m going to college across the country. So I guess I could, like… see him next summer.”

“Or… this summer.”

“Yeah. Fair point. It’s not over yet, is it?”

“It’s barely just begun.”

Beau thought maybe the vodka was starting to kick in – she felt warm, like there was something red and glowing inside her, and her vision seemed a little woozy, although it was hard to tell in the dark. When she turned her head, though, her frame of sight swung off-balance, like it was slow catching up with the movement of her eyes. It was kind of fun, in the way novelty was fun.

“Can I tell you something, too?” Beau asked, on a whim. For some reason the idea of sharing her secrets right now felt exciting rather than terrifying.

He nodded and took another swig. “‘Course.” When she looked at him it was like she was watching him in a movie instead of seeing him in real life. Alcohol was so strange.

“I hate my parents sometimes,” she said, and when she’d started speaking she’d been casual and confident but now her voice tripped uncertainly and her throat swelled up. It was true – but saying it out loud made it even more true, somehow. Like she was confessing a sin.

“Like I don’t hate them in, like, the classic teen way, where I’m like ‘grr, I hate my parents!’ Like, I genuinely feel… so much anger. Towards them. And then I hate myself for it, because like… they came to this country so I could have a better life, and I’m just so fucking ungrateful. But then I wonder if that’s just how they want me to feel. Like I’m a fucking waste of their resources. And then I feel terrible for even thinking that. It’s like this neverending cycle of me feeling guiltier and guiltier and guiltier.”

“That’s dark.”

She huffed. “Yeah.”

He passed her the flask. She took another swallow.

“I feel the same way, though,” he said. “Sometimes.”

“Yeah?”

“Like, I’m adopted. But my parents are, like… white Americans. And they just… they push me so fucking hard sometimes. And sometimes I feel, like… I dunno. I feel like I have to work extra hard to like, prove that I deserve to be here. That they made a good investment. In me.”

“That’s also dark.” Beau’s brain was definitely molasses now. (That was probably why she could even have this conversation without breaking down.) (Especially with Fjord, who was a relative stranger.)

“I know.” Fjord laughed humorlessly. “I guess that’s why I’m afraid to come out to them. Because I don’t wanna be… not the son they wanted.”

Now Beau felt like she might start crying. “I try so hard to be… unique. And badass. And… the version of myself that I wanna be,” she said, carefully so that her voice didn’t break. “But secretly… I wish more than anything. More than anything. That I could just be the daughter they wish they had. I wanna tell them, ‘I’m fucking sorry you got me. Out of all of them, you ended up with this one. I’m so sorry.’” She lowered her head in her hands. Now there were certainly tears in her eyes, for the second time that night. “Sometimes I feel like if I try hard enough to pretend I don’t care, I really will stop caring.”

“It’s so hard to stop,” Fjord said. His voice sounded thick, too.

She sighed heavily and lifted the collar of her t-shirt to wipe her nose. “Maybe college will be different. We’ll have more space to… be who we are.”

“I still don’t wanna disappoint them.”

“…Me neither. But I also can’t… disappoint myself.”

Quiet.

“Yeah. If I go through college without kissing a guy, I’ll be so disappointed in myself.” Fjord’s voice was fragile, despite his joking tone.

Beau smiled. A watery smile. She thought about Yasha. “I bet I’ll kiss a girl this summer.”

“You think so?”

“I bet I can do it.”

“I hope you can. I hope that for you.”

They both laughed shakily. And then sat in silence some more.

“We should probably go back to our houses at some point…” Fjord said after a while.

Beau sighed. “Yeah… probably.”

Real life had to continue. Presumably.

They clambered out of the woods, and then Fjord helped Beau down from the chain-link fence so she wouldn’t have to land on her bare feet. She swayed slightly, his arm on her back.

“You seem kinda tipsy. Are you gonna be good tonight?” he asked.

She scoffed. “Yeah, I’m totally fine.”

She was fine. Mostly. Physically. They walked back through the dark suburban streets in silence, parting ways when they reached Fjord’s street. It was funny walking drunk – she felt like her feet were gliding over the pavement.

Fjord watched her awkwardly as they stood in the empty street, facing each other. “I guess I’ll… see you around?”

She shrugged. “Yeah. ‘Night.”

“‘Night.” He vanished into the shadowy cul-de-sac. His house was only a couple blocks from hers, but she had a funny feeling she wouldn’t see him again for a very long time. Like this night had been some kind of mystical anomaly. An anachronistic bubble before the true end of an era.

But she would see him again, she thought. Somewhere down the line.

She was too buzzed to effectively climb back up to her window, but luckily her parents were asleep by now and she knew the code for the back door. She tip-toed into the kitchen and microwaved some leftover rice, making sure to pop open the door before the timer dinged – she’d heard carbs were good for preventing hangovers. Careful not to let the stairs creak, she brought it up to her room with a thermos full of water and changed into clean sleep clothes. Her skin was still sweaty and kind of muddy, but if she took a shower now she’d definitely wake her parents up. For the moment, she could kind of rub her feet off with a towel.

Glancing in the mirror, she saw the tear stains in wavering, bright lines down her otherwise dirty face. Her hair was frizzy from the humidity and tangled from getting caught in branches. She grabbed a hair tie off her nightstand and gathered it up into a knot – fumbling a bit because her fine motor skills were fairly subpar right now. She felt much fresher with it pulled away from her face. And the undercut looked so fucking cool. Even though she looked like she’d just been trekking through a swamp – that almost made it look even cooler. Like she was some kind of warrior. She grinned at her reflection. Her reflection grinned back.

“Hey. You’re gonna be okay,” she whispered to her reflection.

Her reflection didn’t whisper anything back, but she was still smiling.

Beau finished her rice, setting the bowl down. She glanced around the room – the floor was still a tornado disaster zone, covered in the contents of her dresser and closet and everything that had been on the surfaces of her desk and nightstand, all thrown in disarray by her mother’s rage. She felt a lump in her throat. She swallowed it. You’re gonna be okay, she reminded herself. It wasn’t over yet. It had barely just begun.

Half-heartedly scrubbing her face with her towel, she collapsed onto her bed, curled into a fetal position, not even bothering to climb under the blankets. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. One day, she thought, she’d have her very own room in her very own home. And she’d be safe. This was her final thought before sleep enveloped her.

&

Sneaking out once while she was grounded was pushing her luck, but sneaking out for a second time was definitely flirting with danger.

Technically, her tactic was different this time. Her parents had no way of knowing when her shifts at Save-Mart started and ended or even on which days they fell, so if she left the house wearing her work uniform and toting her car keys and called out ‘off to work!’ as she unlocked the door… they had no reason to believe that she wasn’t actually going to work.

This was what Molly had explained to her at least four times over the phone, and he was right. The plan had gone off without a hitch, even though her palms sweated with anxiety the entire time and it had taken her a full extra hour to work up the nerve to actually try and do it. And then she’d driven to the local mall, hands shaking on the steering wheel the whole way, paying much more attention to her adherence to the speed limit than she usually ever did because getting a ticket right now would be exponentially worse than getting a ticket at literally any other time.

She had no reason to be paranoid, but she was still paranoid. As soon as she parked in front of Knockoff Fashion Emporium she turned her phone on airplane mode just in case her parents could trace it somehow (she didn’t think they could, but… could they?). And then she shoved her visor and apron in the backseat and yanked her Cobalt Orchestra hoodie over her work polo and put on the glasses she’d almost never worn since she got contacts two years ago, so she would look less recognizable in case anyone who knew her parents happened to be at the mall (she didn’t think so, but… maybe?)

Molly was waiting for her in the food court – he couldn’t drive, but he was the type of teen who didn’t think walking for fifty minutes to go to the mall was ‘that big a deal’ and Beau was also pretty sure he was the only person currently alive who still owned light-up Heelys and actively used them. He’d already gotten her a papaya smoothie (her favorite) and had clearly taken a generous sip of it. He wiggled his fingers in a wave. His hair was just now getting long enough for him to pull the top half of it into two curly pigtails, and he appeared to be wearing oversized safety pins as earrings.

She sat down next to him in a huff, grabbing the papaya smoothie and drinking deeply. “I can’t stay long,” she said. “I feel like my parents are gonna find out I lied to them somehow.”

Molly arched an eyebrow, sipping his own smoothie – strawberry banana, it looked like. “Don’t you lie to them all the time?”

She puffed out one cheek. “I mean, yeah. But those are usually, like… indirect lies. White lies, half-lies, lies by omission, that kinda shit. This lie is pretty direct. Like, I definitely said I was going to work, and I am definitely not at work. I don’t even have a shift today.”

“Do you really think they’d find out?”

“I mean… I don’t know how they would. But I somehow feel like they could in some mysterious way, you know?”

Molly patted her hand. “I feel like you’re just anxious, hon. And that’s okay.”

She sighed, resting her chin on her fists. “Ugh. You’re probably right. I should lighten up. I know I’m always telling everybody else to lighten up, but maybe I’m just projecting.” (She wished ‘lightening up’ was as easy as… turning on a light switch.)

“I think you need to be told to lighten up at least as often as you tell other people to lighten up. If not more often.” He checked his phone and then set it facedown on the table surface. “Okay, so I actually had an ulterior motive for gathering us here today.”

Beau rolled her eyes fondly. “I could’ve guessed that.”

“City Youth Style just released their Metrosexual Line and it’s so cute! I wanna get stuff to wear for school next year.”

“Their… what line? And isn’t City Youth Style like, super expensive?”

“I mean, yeah, but I have five rewards accounts so I can get hella discounts.”

“How do you have five?!”

“Let’s see… I used my school email, personal email, your email –”

“Sorry, what?”

“ – my old personal email from when I was in middle school and I made everything anime-related, and Mr. Czrwjyhzwicz’s school email.”

“Isn’t that, like, fraud or something?”

“…He doesn’t have to pay for it, so probably not? And anyway that guy was kind of a dick so he deserves it.”

“I thought he was okay…”

“When we were sophomores he taught AP US History all year without mentioning queer history once!”

“I guess that’s fair. But that’s also mostly the College Board’s fault for designing shitty exam material.”

“Oh don’t worry, I blame them too.”

“Wait, are they actually gonna let you use five rewards accounts at the register? I feel like they’ll only let you use one.”

“Well, that’s why you’re here for moral support.”

“Moral support?”

“It’s easier to ask people for things when you’re not alone.”

Beau couldn’t argue with that.

The atmosphere inside City Youth Style was replete with loud indie trap, strings of expensive-looking hipster lightbulbs, the scent of herbal perfume, and at least a dozen teens who were all better-dressed, better-groomed, and better-at-performing-gender than Beau.

“This place is weird,” Beau whispered at Molly, who was rummaging through a rack of overpriced generic sweaters. “Like, look at these people. Even the queer-looking ones are, like… queer in a conventionally hot way.”

He frowned without looking at her. “We’re queer in a conventionally hot way.”

“We’re queer and we’re hot, but we’re definitely not conventional. By any means.” (Especially not now, when Beau was wearing work slacks, a school hoodie, and unflattering glasses, while Molly was kind of dressed like a lead from an ‘80s workout video but with more statement jewelry.) “And honestly, I feel like even with five rewards accounts’ worth of discounts, this stuff is still gonna be way expensive. Like, this plain, solid-colored baseball cap is…” She picked it up to examine the price tag and then immediately dropped it like was covered in fire ants, hissing, “Jesus fuck!”

Molly sighed. “I mean, you’re right.” He leaned against a wooden shelf full of plastic succulents that each cost more than real succulents. “I guess I just wanted to get some, like… nice masc clothes.”

Beau picked at the fraying jean jacket hanging next to her. “Why? I thought you weren’t that into masc shit.”

“Like… I’m not. Most of the time, anyway. But…” He sighed again, more heavily. “Okay, so my top surgery appointment got pushed back again. Because of, like, money stuff.”

“Oh god, Molly, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, so like… I probably won’t get top surgery until next summer. If all goes well. But that means that I’ll have to keep doing without it through all of freshman year, and I just…” He slumped against the rack, necklaces clattering against each other. “I just really don’t want a bunch of people to misgender me in college. I just want everything to be fine. Would that be so much to ask?” he finished plaintively, seeming to direct his plea at the ceiling up above.

Beau sighed too, turning her own eyes to the ceiling. “It shouldn’t be. It really shouldn’t.”

“I mean, I know people are probably gonna misgender me no matter what, and there’s not a whole lot I can do about that. I was just looking forward to it, hopefully, happening less after top surgery. And now I have to wait longer for that and it sucks.”

“It does suck. I’m so sorry, Molly.” She pulled him into a fierce hug and he buried his nose in her shoulder, sinking against her. (They were about the same height, but Molly was taller today in his platform sneakers.)

“I guess I just wanted to get some, like, fashionable masc clothes… so I would, like, ‘pass better’ or whatever,” he mumbled into her sweatshirt.

She squeezed him tighter, patting his back. She loved him so much it physically hurt. “You’re not masc, Molly. You’re flamboyant as all hell,” she said fondly.

“I know that,” he murmured. She could feel him smiling against her shoulder.

“And… I can’t prevent people from ever misgendering you. But I can beat them up for it. Like, I’ll for real kick their asses. I took taekwondo for, like, eight years, remember?”

“I certainly remember those old pictures of you on Facebook.” His voice sounded a little thick. “And you only have to kick their asses if they’re doing it on purpose. Some people don’t mean any hurt, they’re just dumb and don’t know any better.”

“Just because they don’t mean any hurt doesn’t mean they aren’t hurting you.”

“I guess that’s a valid point.” He stepped away from her, exhaling and delicately dabbing at his eyes with the corner of his mesh shawl. “Fuck it. I don’t wanna waste money at this place. The CEO doesn’t need my contribution to his seventeenth private yacht.”

Beau snorted, clapping him on the shoulder. “Okay, well… I still have at least three hours before I can go home, in order to preserve the illusion that I’m at work. Do you wanna go to the movies?”

He smiled softly, linking his arm through hers. “Sure. I think another Spectacle movie just came out. One of those superhero ones, you know.”

“I could be down for that. Which superhero is it this time?”

“Captain Nationalism.”

“That name is a little heavy-handed, isn’t it?”

“I know, but I’d let Captain Nationalism put his heavy hands All. Over. Me. That guy can get it. His bicep is like, the size of my face.”

Beau hummed as they walked out of the store. “There’s probably gonna be a hot female love interest too, right?”

“Of course. Personally I think he has better chemistry with his male sidekick, though.”

“Oh, obviously. At least the lesbian audience – by which I mean me – can appreciate her form-fitting outfits.”

Molly chuckled and then broke off. “Oh hey, look who’s over there! That’s what’s-her-name!”

Beau frowned and peered around the food court. “Who?”

And then she spotted a head of blue hair disappearing into Scene Central. (Lots of people wandering around Scene Central had blue hair, but this figure was wearing a tight orange dress that Beau recognized because she’d seen it occasionally at school… and thought about it a lot in the shower.) “Oh, that’s Jester.”

“Oh, right! Should we go say hi to her?”

“Nah, she’s too far away. It would be weird, like we’re following her or something.”

Molly stared at her. There was something… calculating in his eyes. And a smirk on his face that she did not like one bit. “Well, okay. If you’re too chicken to go talk to her, that’s fine.”

“I’m not too chicken! It would just be weird!” Beau huffed. “Also, she probably wouldn’t even recognize me in these stupid glasses!”

“Ohhhh, I get it. You don’t wanna go talk to her because you don’t look your best right now! That’s understandable.”

She lightly punched him in the arm. “Hey! That’s rude! Correct, but rude. And also –”

“Wait, is she shopping in the Pride clearance section?” Molly interrupted.

Beau narrowed her eyes (the quality of these glasses wasn’t all that great, to be honest). Through the shopfront window she could sort of see that Jester was, indeed, sorting through various rainbow-emblazoned accessories, all likely being sold at a discount now that it was July. That was… interesting.

“Is she gay?” Molly asked.

“She might be, like… an ally,” Beau reasoned.

“Don’t allies stop caring about Pride when it isn’t Pride Month anymore?”

“I mean… I kind of hope that’s not true.”

“Well, they hopefully still care about, like, all the issues and shit, but they stop wearing rainbow pins and stuff like that after June is over.”

She turned to look at him skeptically. “You’re making a lot of claims right now with basically no evidence.”

He scoffed, bangles sliding down his wrists as he spread his hands. “I just get a feeling about her, okay? Maybe my gaydar is better than yours!”

“I really doubt that,” she snorted as they slowly made their way in the direction of the cinema. “Remember that time you got mad at me because you thought I didn’t give you back your Ramones t-shirt but you were literally wearing it at the time?”

“Gaydar and generalized common sense do not necessarily correlate, Beauregard,” he said, in a goofy imitation of Caleb’s accent that made her guffaw out loud.

He winked and tugged on the drawstring of her hoodie. She slung her arm around his shoulders, bumping their hips. A five-plus-year-old pop song played over the echoey food court speakers. Molly’s cologne smelled like nutmeg.

They were okay. She was okay.

&

Today 19:01

You: hey yahsa  
You: ****yaSha

Yasha: Hi.

You: Hi :)  
You: k so  
You: r u doin anything next wknd

Yasha: Which weekend?

You: 1st wknd in august

Yasha: I’m available.

You: the perseid meteor shower is happenin then

Yasha: Really?

You: Ya

Today 20:06

You: mayb we can watch it 2gethr?  
You: like out by the airfield the view would b v good  
You: no worries if u cant loll hahha

Yasha: Ok. Sounds fun.

Today 21:39

You: YES  
You: i mean like im just so excited 2 see the meteors  
You: haha

Yasha: :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! This chapter was largely friendship-centric but the next one will feature more romance ;)
> 
> Summary of 2nd scene:  
> After fighting with her parents about her grades from last semester, Beau is grounded. During the night she sneaks out of her room and goes to hang out in the local woods to calm down. By coincidence, she runs into Fjord, who happens to live in her neighborhood and seems to be in a similar headspace. Fjord shares his flask with her and they have a conversation about how it's difficult to handle their parents' expectations. Fjord also comes out to her, mentioning that he thinks Caleb and Caduceus are both cute. They both go home and it is ambiguous whether they'll see each other more in the future.
> 
> Summary of 3rd scene:  
> Beau is grounded but sneaks out of the house by pretending she is going to work. She actually goes to the mall to meet Molly, who wants to shop for more masculine clothing because his top surgery appointment has been pushed back and he's worried about being misgendered in college. They share a tender moment and decide to go watch a movie instead. On their way out, they spot Jester looking at clearance Pride merch in a nearby store and speculate about whether that means she's gay.


	4. August

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi I know it's been a while! The world has been wild lately
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter, divided by scene:  
> Scene 1 - reference to a past suicide (to skip, jump from "Yasha didn't say anything for a long, stretched-thin moment" to "She felt like she was alive now. Just for tonight")  
> Scene 3 - troubled parent/child dynamics causing bad feelings about self (I will include a summary of this scene in the end notes)

August was normally Beau’s least favorite month of the summer.

It was late enough in the year that the heat felt massive and heavy, juggernaut-like, a roiling stormcloud that ached to break. The world was hazy, overbaked, humidified and desertified, desperate for cleansing autumn rains. The days stretched too long and hot and the ground choked with dust and even the blue of the sky was faded like a photograph left in the sun too many hours. Besides, it was the final month before school started, and the sense of impending doom always permeated the simmering miasma of overheated asphalt and the numbing hum of the electric fan with ominous portent.

But this August was different, because Beau wasn’t going back to Cobalt High, and she wasn’t going to live in this fuck-ass town anymore. She was still, currently, in this fuck-ass town, and she hadn’t actually started college – it wasn’t so much that this August was different from other Augusts in a tangible way, but more that it carried the anticipation of things being different after this final stretch. Beau’s life was about to change forever, and she didn’t know exactly how yet, but she could taste the certainty of it, and the hope made the blazing afternoons and smoky evenings bearable. Everything is about to change, she thought to herself as she laid on her bedroom floor, sweaty sports bra sticking to her back, window blinds closed to keep out the pugilistic sun and shroud the room in warm-gray shadow. Everything is about to change, she reminded herself as she listened to Molly ramble about pop-punk bands over the phone while she wandered through her neighborhood at dusk, streetlights blinking on as the sky sank into deep blue. Everything is about to change, she breathed as she walked out into the Save-Mart back parking lot after a late shift, undoing her apron and inhaling the muggy night air and the low chirp of frogs from the wooded swamp beyond the edge of the pavement.

Everything is about to change. Beau looked over at Yasha, sitting in the passenger seat next to her. Everything was already changing.

The light on Yasha’s face rotated blue and gold and amber and purple as they drove down Airport Road in the deepening twilight. They were heading out to the airfields on the southwest end of town – there was an old air force base out here that was now mostly disused except for occasional small-scale cargo flights, and it was surrounded by wide, empty grass fields that were probably the property of the federal government or the state government or something but the chain link boundaries were very easy to climb if you were a limber, motivated teenager and there wasn’t anyone around here to stop them anyway. It was quiet except for the lonely call of a mourning dove from one of the trees that lined the road. Yasha glanced at Beau and her eyes sparkled in the shadows as she smiled slightly. Beau quickly fixed her gaze on the road, concentrating on the yellow meridian lines flashing as her headlights passed. “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman played softly from a CD Beau had found in the car. (It was a secondhand vehicle.) (Well, probably third- or fourth-hand.)

Beau couldn’t believe she was alone at night with a pretty girl. She felt like a character in movie. Things like this didn’t happen in real life, did they? They had to, because they were happening now. Beau was so nervous that she imagined her skeleton was vibrating and her tongue was tied in sailor’s knots at the back of her throat. It wasn’t that she necessarily thought something bad was going to happen – well, she was certainly aware of the possibility. Perhaps the novelty was scary. The anticipation. The knowledge that everything that happened tonight, for better or for worse, would happen because of her actions, or would fail to happen because of her cowardice. That was a fair amount of pressure.

It didn’t help that Yasha looked so beautiful it ached. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, loose baby hairs floating around her temples and cheekbones like ink in water. With her hair away from her face, she appeared much younger – her mouth was gentle and slack, lips rendered in smudges of light and shadow, eyes round and unguarded. She’d waited for Beau to pick her up in the parking lot of Save-Mart, swathed in an oversized hoodie, nearly invisible in the dusk. There was something almost unbearably intimate about being alone in a car with her. It was like they were breathing each other’s breath. Beau could barely handle it.

She pulled the car over and parked on the gravelly shoulder next to a gently rolling field, empty except for the distant lights of the airport on one horizon and the distant dark silhouettes of trees on the other. The engine ticked unsteadily as it cooled and the music cut off with a fizzling hiss and the old driver’s seat groaned in protest as Beau bent to recover the water bottle that had fallen onto the floor during the journey. “This seem like a good place to get out?” Beau asked, not trusting herself to meet Yasha’s eyes.

“As good as anywhere,” she heard Yasha say, and then the click of the passenger-side door opening and the crunching thud of Yasha’s sneakers hitting the dry grass. Beau exited the car and headed around to the trunk to grab the sofa cushions she’d ‘borrowed’ from her living room. Molly had assured her that as long as she shook out the grass and dust and replaced them before her parents woke up, everything would be fine. Speaking of Molly, she needed to bake him cookies or something to thank him pretending they were having a sleepover tonight so that her parents wouldn’t get upset. (She was still sleeping over at his place, but he was charitable enough to let her spend most of the night hanging out with their cute coworker instead of him.)

In the steadily growing darkness, Yasha and Beau tossed the cushions and blankets they’d brought over the fence and clambered over it themselves and then trudged to the top of a gentle slope, where they laid out their setup.

Beau sent up a prayer to any gay goddesses out there that the sofa cushions turned out not to be big enough to allow them to lie very far apart. They were right next to each other, arms touching. Beau could hear Yasha inhale and exhale. She could smell her strangely ageless rosewater scent. She knew her body probably felt stiff next to Yasha’s, and she didn’t want Yasha to think that she was uncomfortable being this close to her. The opposite was true. Well, maybe the mirror image was true – she was uncomfortable being this close to Yasha not because she didn’t want to touch her, but because she desperately wanted to touch her and didn’t know how.

How did people learn things like this? Was everybody so terrified and thrilled and terrified in their first thing-resembling-a-romance? Did straight boys learn how to be unafraid around girls, and lesbians had to just figure out the rules by trial and error? Did the risk of error outweigh the benefit of trial? In movies it always seemed like when it came to courtship, everybody knew exactly what witty things to say and exactly which moment they should lean in for a kiss. Beau had never felt particularly witty or particularly skilled at getting the moment right.

“So what does a meteor shower look like?” Yasha murmured.

Beau swallowed, folding her clammy hands over her midriff. “It looks like – it looks like – a bunch of little lights, in the sky. Like, really fast lights. Like the stars are twinkling faster than usual.”

“So… no shooting beams?”

“Well… it is shooting beams, just ones that are really far away in outer space. But still ones that are bright enough to see from Earth without a telescope.”

It was silent for a moment, expect for the light wind rustling in the grass. “You know a lot about this,” Yasha said, tone fond.

Beau puffed out one cheek and released a breath. “Kind of, I guess. I’m sort of into science.”

“You’re really smart.”

Beau’s face felt hot and tingly. She twisted her fingers around each other. “Thanks,” she muttered.

They chatted quietly about work, until Beau noticed movement in the dark sky and sucked in a sharp inhale. “Look,” she said quietly, lifting a hand to gesture vaguely upwards. Yasha sucked in a tiny, sharp inhale as well.

Their town was only about a forty-five-minute drive outside a major metropolitan area, so the umber glow of light pollution still glimmered on the horizon. But a lot of the stars were still visible – probably not as many as they would’ve seen out in the middle of nowhere, but enough to enthrall two teenagers. And it was dark enough to make out the twinkles in the sky, here and there, like gems scattered among pebbles.

“I see them!” Yasha whispered. Beau thought it was cute that she was whispering, as if there was anyone around to hear them, or as if they were witness to an awe-inspiring spectacle that warranted a respectful hush. She wondered if she should tell Yasha that she thought it was cute. Would that be too much? Beau was forever anxiously skirting the edge of ‘too much’. She covered it up by pretending that she didn’t care. It was easier to handle people’s criticism of her behavior if she put up a front of having deliberately stepped on their toes.

But what the fuck did it matter, anyway? So what if she was too much? It wasn’t her fault if other people didn’t have room for her. If they didn’t want to give her room at all. Why should she have to live by their limits?

However, by the time she had this thought the moment was over. Yasha had lolled her head to the side to face Beau, and now she was asking, “Are these for making wishes?”

Beau frowned, confused by the question. “Are they… what?”

“In America you make wishes on shooting stars, yes?”

Beau hummed thoughtfully. “Yeah. Meteors aren’t really shooting stars, though. Although… I guess comets aren’t actually stars either. So maybe these count, too.”

Yasha nodded, rolling her neck over again to peer at the sky. “I think they count.”

“I feel like it is cheating, though,” Beau said, “because there are so many of them. Like, a dozen an hour. If you keep making wishes all night, that’s, like, a lot of wishes.”

“I want a lot of things,” Yasha said, soft as the breeze.

“Me too.” Beau wanted so many things. Sometimes she could barely carry the weight of all the things she didn’t have yet.

She glanced at Yasha again. Yasha’s face was faint and ethereal in the blue darkness. “What do you want?” Beau whispered. (She felt it was only right to whisper if you were asking about someone’s deepest desires.)

Yasha didn’t say anything for a long, stretched-thin moment. Then she closed her eyes. “I wish my girlfriend wasn’t dead,” she whispered, pronouncing the words slowly.

Beau’s insides dematerialized. “…Oh,” she murmured. She wasn’t sure if she actually said it out loud or if her mouth just made the shape.

“It was… hard, in my town,” Yasha continued, voice pale. “It was hard to be… it was hard to be like us. Two girls. When our families found out, it was the hardest of all. She couldn’t handle it. She…” Yasha trailed off, and Beau realized it was because she was too choked up to speak. Her tears glistened in the starlight.

“Hey, hey… it’s okay…” Beau pressed closer to Yasha, leaning into her warmth and reaching out a hand to grab her wrist. She felt woefully inadequate. What the fuck was she supposed to say? Her heart was sore. “You survived,” she settled on, because it was true. “You… are surviving.”

“…Sometimes I feel like I didn’t. Like I’m just a ghost now.”

Beau knew what it was like to feel like a ghost. She felt like the real Beauregard Lionett had never attended Cobalt High a day in her life, and those classrooms had only been haunted by the ghost of her all these years. But she would be a real person soon. She’d come to life after this summer.

She felt like she was alive now. Just for tonight. A bubble. A wish.

Or if she wasn’t alive yet, she was at least in a dream about being alive.

“We’re alive now,” Beau murmured, because maybe saying it would make it true.

And it did feel true, as Yasha’s head turned, and their faces were close enough that Beau could see her irises like dark glass and the slightly unruly hairs at the corners of her eyebrows. “I do feel alive around you,” Yasha whispered.

Beau’s breath caught. “I feel the same,” she said. Or maybe she only thought it. It didn’t matter either way, because in the next breath Yasha was kissing her.

It was just a gentle kiss. No force behind it. Beau had never been kissed before – it was softer than she expected it to feel, and somehow simultaneously exactly what she’d imagined and lightyears away from what she’d imagined. It was strange to be so close to someone – she could smell Yasha’s skin, and feel rather than hear her almost imperceptible hum as she moved. At first Beau didn’t really know what to do, but as Yasha started to pull away, Beau reached out a hand to cup the back of her head and pull her back, and then Beau started moving her mouth and they were really kissing.

Kissing was unbelievably fun, as it turned out. (She couldn’t wait to report this to Molly.) Yasha opened her mouth and slid her tongue into Beau’s mouth and then it was even better, and Beau tried to do the same thing and it was a little awkward initially because their teeth clacked against each other but then Yasha just pulled away, giggling and extracting one of her hairs from the corner of her mouth, and then they came back together, readjusting noses, and it was good again. Beau pressed up into her, rolling on top of her, bracketing her with her arms – the connection between their bodies was euphoria, and every physical movement Yasha made sent sparks showering through Beau’s soul like she was a red-hot sword on the anvil. She couldn’t get close enough. They wrapped themselves in each other, entangled but dynamic as they swelled and ebbed in a rhythm that somehow came naturally.

Eventually Beau got brave enough to let her hands wander from Yasha’s cheeks to her neck to her shoulders and on down to her ribs and the cushioned divot of her waist, and Yasha reached up and grabbed Beau’s hair so she could yank her head to one side and kiss her neck, and oh, that was a very hot thing to do and also felt so good that Beau couldn’t stop herself from making an embarrassing sound, and also she definitely wanted to try that on Yasha as soon as Yasha was done trying that on her.

Yasha’s fingers combed through Beau’s hair and then her mouth left Beau’s neck, murmuring, “I love the shaved part.”

Beau thrilled. She ducked her head to nuzzle under Yasha’s jaw, mouth open and yearning.

It was hard for Beau to tell how long they spent making out, alone in the field under the stars. Time passed strangely when you were immersed in something new and powerful. A sea change. It might’ve been hours. It might’ve only been a few minutes.

But then Beau was kissing Yasha’s cheeks and she felt water under her lips. She stayed still long enough to feel a gentle, aborted heaving underneath her. Yasha was crying.

Beau leaned away far enough to see Yasha’s face, resting on one elbow. She swallowed nervously. “Is… is everything okay?”

Yasha squeezed her eyes shut as if she was trying not to let the tears escape. She scrunched her nose tighter and tighter and then she released her muscles, huffing out a pained laugh as she sniffed and wiped her eye with the heel of her hand. “I’m sorry, I just…”

“Don’t apologize,” Beau said quickly, eager to help her feel safe.

Yasha laughed again, in that way that wasn’t really laughter. A choked, bewildered sound. “I just… I feel like I’m cheating on her. I know it’s silly.”

Beau exhaled deeply, because she didn’t know what to say. “It’s not… it’s not silly.” And it wasn’t silly. Beau knew it wasn’t. She wanted Yasha to run to her, but she didn’t want to deny Yasha’s truth. It was just challenging to configure the balance between those two things.

Yasha pressed her fingers over her eyes and laughed softly, this time in a brittle way. “I’m such a… I’m such a broken, broken thing. I’m a pile of shattered pieces shuffling along.”

Now Beau laughed in an equally brittle way – that mental image was sort of humorous, but the sentiment wasn’t. “Yasha. Don’t say that about yourself,” she whispered, carefully smoothing loose locks of hair away from the side of Yasha’s face – her ponytail was almost entirely unraveled.

Yasha’s eyes flicked up to meet Beau’s. Her smile was wan. “It’s not that I don’t think I’ll ever heal,” she said. “It’s that I’m not healed yet. I wish I was. I wish everything was okay, right now.”

Beau sighed heavily and relaxed onto her back, angling her head so it rested against Yasha’s. “Me too.” She reached over and took Yasha’s hand and for a moment they both just looked at their joined hands, fingers interlocking against the twinkling sky. “But it will be. Someday.”

Yasha hummed. “I think you’re the brightest star I see tonight.”

It took Beau a second to process that. And then she snorted. “What a line.”

Yasha chuckled ruefully. “It’s just what I really think.”

“I believe you.” Heart beating bravely, she leaned over and kissed Yasha again. Slowly, Yasha encircled Beau’s neck with her arms and they were in it again. They were alive.

&

Yasha hadn’t texted Beau since that night.

And Beau hadn’t seen her at work either – somehow they just hadn’t had any overlapping shifts, or maybe they were always just in different areas of Save-Mart. It had only been a week – that wasn’t that much time.

Beau hadn’t texted her much after the first day or two. It felt weird carrying on a one-sided conversation, and she didn’t want to pressure Yasha either. Where was the line between courtship and pressure? What did Yasha want? What did Beau want?

She wanted to kiss Yasha again. She wanted them to be girlfriends, whatever that even meant. She wanted to feel someone else’s hands on her body and someone else’s gentle words in her ear so she could know she was real.

She wasn’t grounded anymore, at least. That definitely improved her sense of reality. She could go to Molly’s house whenever she wanted without having to lie about it, and they could do their typical summer routine of choosing a movie to stream from some illegal website and then Molly made virgin cocktails out of whatever he could find in the kitchen while Beau drove to the nearby Mexican chain to pick up tacos. The warm grocery bag and the steamy scent of chorizo and mole and shredded beef and the low buzz of the fluorescent lights inside the restaurant grounded her in the moment. It was dark outside. The tiled floor was greasy. The air was humid on her skin. She was here, now, and the future and the past were in the shadowy wings.

“Beau? Is that you?” someone said.

Beau turned her head as she exited the Mexican restaurant. The sidewalk was dimly lit and the parking lot even less so, especially under the trees, but she could make out the figure of a short, plump person stepping out of their dark, shiny car. She squinted. “Yeah?”

“Heya! I didn’t expect to see you here!” Jester bounded onto the pavement, drawing close to Beau. Because of course it was Jester, rhinestone hoop earrings sparkling, rounded features washed out by the harsh glow of the light from indoors. “Are you picking up takeout, too?” Jester asked, smile dazzling. She pulled a rose-pink wallet out of her jacket pocket and tucked her hair behind one ear.

Beau lifted her grocery bag of boxed tacos, half-grinning. “Yeah. It’s taco night with Molly.”

“Awww. Fun,” Jester cooed. “Do you guys do that a lot?”

“Uh-huh. All the time.” She paused, feeling like she was expected to say something else. “You, uh… You can, uh, join sometime. If you want,” she added awkwardly. She had no idea why she was suggesting it – she and Jester weren’t really close. But she sort of felt like she wanted to be. Jester made her happy, unlike most of the things in this town. Maybe Jester was a part of her past that she wanted to bring with her into the future. Just maybe.

Jester’s smile dialed up a few watts. “Really? I’d love that.”

Beau’s cheeks flushed. She felt uncomfortably vulnerable. She shuffled her feet, fixing her gaze on the concrete sidewalk. “Uh. Cool.”

“We can also do taco nights, too.”

Beau lifted her eyes, brow furrowed. “What do you mean? I just said –”

Jester bit her lip, looking uncharacteristically shy. “I mean, like… you and me. Like, we can also, like… hang out.”

Beau nodded in understanding, mouth making an ‘ah’ shape. “Yeah. Like. Totally.”

Jester smiled, still biting her lip. She had slightly pointed incisors. “Cool.”

“Cool.”

Jester giggled, peeking up at Beau through her long eyelashes. “Well… I should pick up my food. But I’ll see you later, Beauuuregaaaard,” she sing-songed.

Beau laughed. “Yeah, okay. See ya, Jester.”

Glancing one last time at the royal-blue back of Jester’s hair, she retreated to her car, placing the food on the passenger side and settling into the driver’s seat. She loved her car so much, even though it was a bit of a junker. Or possibly she just loved having a car. It felt like a mobile safe zone. She always had somewhere to sit, and to store snacks, and to shelter from the rain, and to think complicated thoughts about pretty girls.

Had Jester been flirting with her? That interaction had kind of felt like… that. But sometimes girls were just friendly and it seemed like flirting. Beau didn’t know how to tell for sure, because to be honest she didn’t have a whole lot of female friends. Well, she had Yasha – she had Yasha. Yasha was a whole other thing.

Beau slid her phone out of her pocket. Still no new texts – other than Molly nagging her to hurry up with the food. She briefly made eye contact with her reflection in her rearview mirror and sighed, blinking slowly in solidarity. Then her reflection disappeared as she angled her head, inserting the key in the ignition.

&

Yasha still hadn’t texted Beau.

This, bizarrely, was the thought that repeatedly spiralled through her head as she made her slow trek along the side of the freeway, kicking loose gravel off the pavement with her worn-out no-longer-white Keds. They were the only shoes she’d been able to grab on her way out, because they were the only pair she’d kept in her closet instead of the shoe rack downstairs.

She’d run away again. This time there hadn’t been a fight, not really. Just a conversation. Or a lecture. About how Beau was an ungrateful drain on the family resources and her mom was worrying about her academic future so much that her health was suffering. “How is that my fault?” Beau had wanted to yell. She hadn’t yelled it, because she didn’t really believe that it wasn’t her fault.

She was a bad daughter. There was no longer any point in denying it. If she were better, if she worked harder, if she respected her parents more, if she were smarter, gentler, prettier, more feminine, less of a human error… then they would love her more. It wouldn’t be like this.

Beau didn’t know how to not be herself. She didn’t know how to stop ruining her parents’ lives – those two things felt inextricably linked. What she did know how to do, though, was climb out the window and get the fuck away.

She hadn’t taken much time to get properly dressed or throw some things in a bag or even charge her phone. She’d just been curled up on top of her bedspread, crying with her face pressed into a pillow so no one would hear and wishing she’d never been born, and she couldn’t do anything to change the fact that fate had brought her into existence but it would certainly help to get as far away from her sense of personhood as she could possibly go.

The woods didn’t feel far enough away this time. She’d just kept walking. It had probably been an hour and a half or two hours since she’d left the house – she wasn’t exactly sure. Fortunately the night was balmy enough that she didn’t need more than the light zip hoodie she’d already been wearing.

It was dark, though. And she was completely alone. And she didn’t entirely know where she was. And the cars rushing past her at seventy miles per hour were making her anxious – panic built in her throat.

How would she get home? She didn’t want to go home. But she had to go home. Where else would she go? How would she get home? She didn’t want to go home. But she had to – she was stuck in a loop. She couldn’t walk back. She couldn’t remember the way, and she was exhausted and hardly feeling stable enough to think clearly. Hugging one arm around herself, she tapped into her phone and dialed Molly’s contact. “Come on, pick up, please pick up, you bastard,” she muttered, hands sweaty.

No answer. She called again.

Still no answer.

He was probably asleep. He’d been trying to go to bed early these days to ‘prepare for college’. Which was good for him, and probably a generally healthy habit anyway, but it wasn’t good for her in these very specific circumstances.

She felt tears building behind her eyes as she dialed again, vision blurring. Ghostlike, she wandered over to the railing that separated the highway shoulder from a dark ravine overgrown with blackberry vines, and she sat down uncomfortably on the rusted metal. She wiped her face on her sleeve. No answer. She dialed again. A tear rolled over the corner of her mouth. No answer. She dialed again. She lowered her head into her hands. No answer.

Who else could she call? She didn’t want to call her parents. She didn’t have Fjord or Caduceus’s number. She didn’t feel comfortable calling Jester or Yasha – and who knew what was going on with Yasha, anyway? It had been nothing but radio silence from her. Beau hoped she was okay, in a sort of abstract sense, because she herself wasn’t okay at all right now and she didn’t have the headspace to devote to anything besides that at this exact moment.

Out of options, she pressed the call button on the only other contact she could think of.

The phone rang once. Twice. Three times. Four –

“Hallo?” Caleb grumbled through the speaker. He sounded groggy. He said something else in German.

Beau exhaled a laugh – bizarre that she could find things funny right now, miserable as she was, but somehow the emotional dissonance made sense. “English, please.”

“Oh. Ja. Sorry. Hallo, Beauregard. May I ask why you are calling me at this hour?”

She scrubbed a hand over her forehead. “Look, I – I need your help?”

“…My help? With what?”

“I’m… I’m stranded by the side of the freeway. It’s kind of a long story, but I need a ride back to my place. Can you drive me?” She winced. “Like… right now?”

To her unending gratitude, Caleb didn’t ask for a more detailed explanation. He only sighed and said. “Okay. Can you send me your location?”

She almost sobbed with relief. “God. Yes. Thank you so much, dude. I owe you BIG time. I’ll wash all your dishes for the rest of the month.”

“Rest of the year,” he corrected somewhat testily.

She snorted. “I’ll be away at college!”

“You expect me to drive all the way there to get you, and yet you wouldn’t drive back here from college to wash my dishes for me?” She heard shuffling as he, presumably, got up and put on a jacket. “I am kidding. I will be at college as well. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes or so, ja? Can you wait?”

“Ja – I mean, yeah. I can wait. Uh,” she chewed her lip. “Thanks. Dude. I really do owe you.”

“We Germans are just so much more noble than you Americans,” he said drily. “But don’t worry about it,” he added, tone more sincere. “I am hanging up now. We will see each other soon.”

Beau nodded even as she heard the beep of the call ending, forgetting that he couldn’t see her anyway.

As she waited, her heartrate slowed, and she began to feel more rational. She was going to be okay.

The way her parents treated her wasn’t her fault, she reminded herself. It wasn’t her fault that everyone thought she was too much because they hadn’t left enough room for her. Soon she would be free, to be as much as she wanted to be, because she could build her own space.

It hurt that her parents didn’t validate her. It was a deep, heavy hurt, far down in some abyss within her soul. But… naming the pain somehow lessened it, infinitesimally. It didn’t fix it, but it gave her hope that it could be fixed, and that was enough for now.

Before long a car pulled over on the shoulder, rumbling as it parked slowly and methodically. Caleb carefully got out, red hair lifting in the wind from passing traffic, features hollow and shadowy and harvest-moon-colored in the freeway lights. “I don’t actually have a license,” he said, by way of greeting.

She was so thrown, she momentarily forgot to be sad. “You – what?” she said, half-laughing.

He smirked ruefully. “I don’t have a license. I’ve only driven loops in parking lots a few times – and that was back in Germany. And I understand the theory of driving very well – I just haven’t practiced, a whole lot.” He peered into the car and then back out. “Luckily these American automatic cars are much easier than stick shift. This is my host mother’s car, by the way, so rest assured I am very motivated not to wreck it.”

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Beau started really laughing, despite everything. She laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation. At Caleb’s Caleb-ness. At her own Beau-ness.

She stood and walked over to him and then, on a whim, she wrapped her arms around him in a tight hug. For no real reason other than that he’d come to rescue her, or at least to drive her home, and his presence made her feel marginally happier, and he cared about her, and damn it all to hell… she cared about him.

He gingerly placed his hands on her back and stiffly patted her spine. “There, there,” he said, voice stilted.

She chuckled into his shoulder and pulled away. “Okay. So you think you can get me home without wrecking the car?”

He set his jaw, laying a hand over his heart. “I swear it, madam.”

She laughed some more, wiping a tear from her eye. And then she climbed in the passenger seat.

When they were both buckled in, enclosed in the darkness and new-car-smell and safety, she turned to him and grinned – a watery grin, but a grin nonetheless. “Hey, Caleb, we’re friends, huh?”

He snorted as he adjusted the side mirror. “Ja, I should hope so.”

She was struggling to express the enormity of her sentiment. Words didn’t feel like enough. “No, like – you’re a good person.”

He turned to look at her, eyes thoughtful. “You are, too, Beauregard. I hope you understand that.”

She released a breath, unclenching her jaw – she hadn’t realized she’d been clenching it. “I think I’m starting to,” she said softly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary of scene 3: After another conflict with her parents, Beau runs away from home and walks until she reaches the freeway. Panicking about needing to get home, she tries to call Molly but he doesn't answer. She calls Caleb instead and he comes to pick up her up. They share a tender moment.
> 
> Thank you for reading! Love u all :')


	5. September

Beau lay on top of her bed, half paying attention to an old episode of a sitcom she’d seen dozens of times and munching on a packet of chocolate shavings she’d stolen from work. It was twilight, not yet completely dark out, but the sky was a deep violet and the air had cooled from the afternoon’s baking heat. September had begun, but in this part of the country the weather remained summer-like well past the equinox. Even still, she could feel a slight bite in the atmosphere that hadn’t been there last month – she thought twice about sleeping with her window open now. And in an existential sense she could tell that summer was drawing to a close.

Since the public universities in her state were on the quarter system, she wouldn’t move into her dorm until the last week of the month, but she’d already begun packing up her childhood bedroom, or at least loosely dividing her belongings into amorphous categories of ‘bringing to college’, ‘leaving behind’, ‘should probably just donate this’, and ‘probably just garbage, actually’. There was a large cardboard box in the corner of the room that would eventually contain her clothes, and she’d started peeling posters off the wall to either roll them up and pack them away or discard them because they were already too fragile to survive the journey or simply represented a version of herself that no longer existed. There was one from her favorite band when she was thirteen that she no longer listened to except so that she and Molly could make fun of the goofy song lyrics. Another from a TV show she’d loved when she’d gone through her anime phase in freshman year. A promo poster for the regional chamber music competition last year – it was funny how life-or-death that event had felt at the time compared to how inconsequential it felt now. It was as if dozens of different Beauregards had lived in this room, one after the other, each leaving behind evidence of her presence to indicate how distinct she had been from the Beauregard who lived here now. At this point, Beau wasn’t even sure which Beauregard she was currently – had she become a new version of herself since the beginning of the summer? How much had changed?

One fairly significant thing had changed. She’d – finally – kissed a girl! Although she felt a bit weird about that because Yasha had more or less vanished from her life over the last few weeks. She hadn’t responded to any of Beau’s occasional texts, and she hadn’t seen her at work at all – it was possible she’d quit. Beau didn’t know.

As much as she’d enjoyed making out with her under the stars, she wished Yasha hadn’t been crying that night. It was a stupid, selfish wish and she hated herself for even entertaining it, because she knew it wasn’t Yasha’s fault she was traumatized and it definitely wasn’t her fault she was still sad. God, Beau couldn’t even imagine how destroyed she herself would be if she really had lost Molly in sophomore year – she’d probably be crying next to the orange crates at work, even now. She understood Yasha’s pain, or at least empathized with it, but there was a small, naïve part of her that yearned to make Yasha happy and felt childishly frustrated that it wasn’t working. True love’s kiss did not, in fact, solve everything, as it turned out, and really she’d already known that, but she hadn’t wanted it to be true. Still didn’t want it to be true.

Her room was mostly shrouded in blue shadows now. Sighing shortly, she shut her laptop with a click so that the darkness enveloped her. It was quiet except for the low murmur of her mother watching the news in another room, music distantly playing from somebody’s backyard, a woodpecker in the maple tree behind the house. Summer night sounds. (Summer-becoming-fall.)

There was another sound – a new one. A slight thud at her window.

Beau stilled, frowning. Another soft thud.

Carefully, she got up and padded over to the window to peer outside. She saw a figure standing in the grass, rearing back to toss another pebble, or wad of fabric, or something.

She squinted. Long hair. Bleached ends. A chin tattoo. “Yasha? Is that you?” she hissed, stomach suddenly flipping inside out.

Yasha’s arm lowered. “Beau! I’m glad you’re here.”

“You’re glad – I live here! What are you doing here?”

Yasha shifted her feet in the dry grass. “I wanted to talk to you.”

Beau pushed up the window screen so she could lean her elbows on the outer sill. “How did you find my house?”

“You shared your location with me one time and I think you never turned it off.”

Even in the dark, Beau could make out Yasha’s sheepish smile and feel what it did to her heart. She huffed. “Okay, hang on a sec. I’m coming down.” Taking a moment to set her phone on her nightstand and remove her socks, she clambered out the open window, shimmying her way down the gutter until she felt the cool earth beneath her feet. (Apparently she’d gotten pretty good at this over the last couple months.) (Just in time to move out of this house.)

Beau turned to face Yasha – she couldn’t figure out what to do with her hands, so she tried hanging them at her sides and tried folding her arms and tried clasping them behind her back before giving up and shoving them into the pockets of her shorts. She felt sweaty and she couldn’t meet Yasha’s eyes. What the hell did you say to someone you’d kissed a month ago and hadn’t heard from since?  
Yasha cleared her throat quietly. The summer-dry grass rustled as she shifted her feet again. “Well, I… Beau, I came here to tell you that… I don’t think we should see each other.”

So that was a thing.

Beau bowed her head and stared avidly at the bones of her bare feet as pins and needles shot through her internal organs at lightning speed. She didn’t know why she felt surprised – she should’ve been expecting this, after Yasha pretty much ghosted her for a month. But it still stung. Part of her wanted to analyze exactly why Yasha wasn’t interested in dating her, but she couldn’t let herself spiral like that, at least not until she was alone in her room and could angry-cry in peace. Numbly, it occurred to her that she should say something. “Um… can I ask why?” she addressed her feet.

A soft sigh. “Because… we met at the wrong time.”

At this, Beau lifted her head, frowning skeptically at Yasha’s elegant features in the deepening dusk. “Wha – Okay, what does that even mean? How is it ‘the wrong time’? We met at the time we met. It’s not like there’s some alternate universe where everything happened a different, better way and we’re stuck in, like, the trial run. This is – this is the way things happened. In real life. There’s no, like… other way it was ‘supposed to be.’”

It felt funny to say that, because it seemed like she’d spent all summer waiting for real life to begin. But as it turned out, real life might’ve already begun while she wasn’t paying attention. Possibly, everything that had ever happened to her was real life, and pretending it wasn’t real life wouldn’t erase the mark it had left on her identity. But she didn’t have time to unpack that right now, because there was a girl in front of her who was beginning to cry, and also she was maybe being dumped right now? Did it count as a breakup if you were never really together?

Yasha sighed again. Her breath sounded brittle. “I just…” She hugged herself, squeezing her triceps with thin fingers. “I just… you’re so wonderful, Beau. You really are. And I’m not… I wish I was… I wish I was ready for this. But I’m not. That’s why I’m saying… I wish we’d met later in life, when my heart will be more open. I hope it will be more open, anyway.”

It was quiet for a moment, except for the woodpecker and the distant music and the night sounds. Beau chewed her lip, considering how to verbally express the turmoil in her chest.

She settled on: “I don’t… I don’t mind that you’re sad. I get it. I can help you.”

Yasha shook her head sadly. “You don’t get it.”

“I do!” Beau insisted, spine heating up. “Well, obviously I don’t, like… directly know what it was like. What happened to you. But you shouldn’t, like… not be with me, because you think I, like, can’t handle your issues or whatever. That’s not true at all. I don’t mind. I don’t mind, Yasha!”

But Yasha was still shaking her head, expression melancholy. “Like I said before… I am a broken, broken thing, Beau. And it isn’t your job to put the pieces back together.”

“I’ll make it my job. I don’t fucking mind.” Beau was getting frustrated. She wanted to stamp her foot on the grass, but it occurred to her that that might appear childish.

Yasha choked out an unhappy laugh. “It’s my job, though. You don’t have to do it for me. I don’t want you to do it for me.”

Beau narrowly stopped herself from groaning. “I’m choosing it, though! I’m making this choice!”

“You shouldn’t –”

“Let me make this choice!” Beau demanded, feeling tears well up. Angrily, she rubbed one eye with the heel of her hand. “Yasha, I choose you! I want to choose you, let me choose you!”

But Yasha was shaking her head again, face a portrait of grief. “You can’t choose me. I’m not an option.”

And at that, all the anger blew out of Beau, like she’d fallen and hit the ground too hard. She still wanted to cry, but now it was out of exhaustion rather than frustration. Yasha wasn’t an option. There it was. There it was. That was it.

When Beau didn’t say anything, Yasha tentatively broke the silence. “Maybe someday our paths will cross again, but it’s too early now. It’s the wrong time.”

“The wrong time,” Beau muttered. She didn’t feel like it was the wrong time. ‘The wrong time’ implied some kind of liminal space where cosmic mistakes occurred and reality was blurry. Reality felt as sharp as a blade’s edge right now. Grown-up heartache had come along and knocked the wind out of her. When had she stopped being a child? How had she spent so much time waiting to grow up and yet hadn’t noticed that she’d already crossed the threshold? And in this fuck-ass town, of all places. She wanted to get out of here, and yet she was tired of wanting to get out of here. Yearning drained so much of her energy. Wistfulness would do her in.

After another long moment of Beau not saying anything, Yasha said quietly. “I’ll… I’ll just go.” And she turned towards the back gate, which was surrounded by overgrown ivy and juniper bushes and cypress trees and led to a little path that connected to another empty cul-de-sac. Beau watched her retreating back, her hair glimmering palely in the rising moonlight, the dirt caked on the sides of her shoes.

“Wait,” Beau called out, taking an aborted step forward.

Yasha paused, peering at her over her shoulder. She didn’t look hopeful, exactly, and she also didn’t look pained, but it was somewhere between those two things.

Beau swallowed. “Just… thank you. Thank you for everything, anyway.”

Yasha cracked a slight smile, even though her eyes were still sad. She really did have the prettiest goddamn smile. Beau hoped one day she could see Yasha smile joyfully, without any hidden sorrow behind it. Or maybe she would never see Yasha smile at all again, but even if that was the case, she hoped someone would see Yasha’s true smile. Even if that person wasn’t Beau. Even when that person wasn’t Beau.

She acknowledged the pain. Rolled it around in her hands. Felt its texture. And she set it down on the grass, keeping it by her with due respect, but not letting it weigh her down.

“Thank you for everything, too,” Yasha said softly. “You really are an angel.”

And then she was gone, and Beau was alone.

&

“And then she just left,” Beau said into the phone, picking at loose stitching in the faux-leather cover of her steering wheel.

She was parked outside the now-deserted Cobalt High School campus, because it was relatively close to work and she’d just gotten off a shift, and she didn’t want to be at home and she didn’t really want to walk anywhere either and the only other place she felt like driving was Molly’s house but he wasn’t there right now because his family was away at a seashore camping trip this weekend. Hence the reason they were talking on the phone instead of in person.

Beau wasn’t generally an overly sentimental person, but even she had to admit there was something poignant about being here, alone in the parking lot of a collection of buildings she’d spent four years of her life actively hating – it was almost loving, the amount of her soul she poured into that hatred – but now she had no ties to this place and it meant nothing to her. Well, it didn’t mean nothing. It was a part of her past, for better or for worse, and she could physically be here and she could look at the way the golden pre-sunset light hit the brick facades but it would never again be her present.

And it was poignant, too, that she was talking to her best friend on the phone, because she imagined they’d be talking on the phone a whole lot over the next year. They were going to different state universities, both of them in reasonable driving distance of this town but in opposite directions, making the distance between the two points borderline unreasonable. It certainly felt more-than-borderline unreasonable for Molly to be so far away from her, and yet it was happening. It was real. It ached because she couldn’t do anything about it and she didn’t want to and yet it hurt anyway.

High school was really, truly over. It hadn’t fully sunk in until just now.

“She just… left? Like, where did she go?” Molly asked, voice tinny through the speaker.

Beau shrugged, and then remembered he couldn’t see her. “I don’t know. Home, I guess? Has she been at work?”

“I haven’t seen her. I think maybe she quit.”

“Did you ask?”

“I mean… no. I guess I was worried about phrasing it in a way where she might think I was, like, judging her.”

“I don’t… think she would necessarily think that?” But Beau didn’t actually know Yasha very well at all, did she? It was a prickling, sideways realization. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. I doubt I’ll ever see her again.”

“I mean, who knows? Maybe you’ll meet again, somewhere down the line… star-crossed lovers…”

Beau snickered and clunkily lifted one of her sneakers up onto the dashboard. The dirty white laces turned creamy-gold in the slanted light. Molly was a bit of a romantic. “Maybe,” she said, humoring him. And who knew? Maybe he was right. Maybe he wasn’t.

She was sort of sad about Yasha, but she mainly just felt… hollow, about the whole thing. It was the hollowness of knowing that she couldn’t have what she wanted, and understanding why she couldn’t have it, and even of letting go of the desire out of stoic maturity while also feeling nostalgic for the younger, more naïve version of herself who believed all her dreams would come true. It was complicated to explain but it felt uncomplicated in her body. An absence of complication.

“Hey, Molly,” she murmured, watching the bright sun slowly descend below the spiky blackened silhouettes of fir trees, godfingers of yellow light painting glowing streaks on the asphalt.

He hummed in acknowledgment, and she realized she hadn’t actually had anything to say to him.

“I… love you,” she said, because it was true. And as she said it, she understood that that was what she’d meant to say. That’s what she’d been saying all along, every time she ever talked to him. “You’re my best friend.”

“Aww. I love you, too. I’m gonna miss the shit out of you this year.”

“Yeah? I’m gonna miss the fuck out of you, too.” She scrunched her eyes shut because she could feel her throat swelling up. Why was she crying so much these days? “Promise you’ll call every day. At least every other day.”

“Oh, darling, I’ll be calling every hour.”

She laughed, running a fingernail along the curve of the steering wheel, watching the sky gradually turn lavender. “Fuck. FUCK. I’m gonna miss you.” She didn’t know how to say it enough to fully get the point across.

“I know,” he said softly, and she felt like he got it.

“Summer’s over, huh?” she said after a pause.

He hummed. “Summer’s over.”

His tone was mournful, and it resonated in Beau’s chest because she hadn’t expected to mourn this place. This time. This version of her.

But it was over, for better or for worse. And the only emotion she’d expected was euphoria, and maybe there was some euphoria, but maybe there was also grief and God knows what else. Growing up was so fucking strange.

“Fuck. I’m kinda sad,” she laughed, rubbing her eyes.

“I get it. It’s a transition. You’re gonna be sad no matter what.”

“Fair point.”

“But real life is starting, remember? Get excited!”

“I think real life already started. I think college is just a new phase of it.”

“A better phase.”

“A better phase, yeah. But… this other phase, the one that just ended, wasn’t so terrible. I guess.”

He snorted. “Beau. I never thought I’d ever hear you say that.”

She laughed, more happily this time. “It really wasn’t! I kissed a girl in it.”

“True.”

“And it had you in it. You’re part of my past, too.”

“And your present,” he added.

“And my future,” she continued. “If you remember to call.”

He laughed too. “I will. I already set a reminder on my phone.”

“Okay, good.”

There was a comfortable pause. She listened to the faint sounds of him breathing on the other end of the line, feeling a bone-deep gratitude for each of his inhalations and exhalations. And she watched the sky turn amber. And she was okay. Things were okay. Everything was finally okay.

&

Beau had finished her last shift at Save-Mart yesterday. Caleb was still working through the end of the week, and then he was done, too. The store would probably hire some more hapless high school students to replace them. She was already actively forgetting all the drink recipes she’d forced herself to memorize and washing and re-washing all her clothes to purge the ever-pervasive coffee smell.

By the end of next week, she’d have moved into her dorm room in a multistory building in an urban city block, with dozens of miles of freeway between there and here. And then only a few days later she’d be taking college classes, and presumably within weeks after that she’d have cool college friends and she’d be growing up even faster.

She felt like she’d already grown up a lot this summer. It was funny to remember last spring, when she’d fantasized about meeting an older lady who’d let her live in her mansion and take care of all her needs for her. She was so far away from that version of herself now. It wasn’t that she no longer yearned to feel safe and cared for – she was pretty sure everybody yearned for that. But she had a sort of sense now that life wasn’t easy and it probably wouldn’t get much easier, but she was also strong and she was probably going to get much stronger. She could make the life she wanted, whenever she wanted to. And not all of her wishes would necessarily come true, but she would carry on anyway and be better for it.

It was entirely possible, in fact, that Yasha had been right, in a way. Some things weren’t meant to be, even if she wanted them very badly, and that was okay. The gaps left space for other opportunities, if she was brave enough to go and get them. And brave enough to believe she deserved them.

Beau had always had a hard time believing she deserved good things. And she still didn’t entirely believe it. But she now had the intention of trying to believe it, and that felt like a massive step in a new and important direction.

She sat down heavily on her bedspread, late-afternoon light slanting across her brown thighs, and just breathed for probably a full minute, psyching herself up. And then, heart in her throat, she sent out a quick text to a number she’d never contacted before.

Almost immediately her phone pinged with a response and she deflated in relief. Excitement whispered in her chest.

She stood, glancing around at her haphazardly half-packed room. “I’ll deal with you later,” she said, pointing to the pile of laundry on the floor next to an empty cardboard box. (It did not respond.)

Half an hour later, she’d parked outside Save-Mart and was walking through the automatic glass doors for one last trip to the coffee stand. She thought she’d almost miss the way the air was more chilly indoors, the sterile smell of packaged bread, the quiet pinging and humming of a dozen checkout stands over a muffled soundtrack of easy-listening ‘80s ballads.

Caleb was behind the counter, dressed in his apron and visor, just as she knew he would be. His pale eyebrows lifted in surprise when he saw her. “Beauregard. You do not have to work today, you know.”

“I know. I fuckin’ quit, man.” She leaned her elbows on the counter, peering around the stand. It looked a lot tidier now that she wasn’t working there. She hadn’t been the greatest employee, to be honest. She’d likely saved her manager the trouble of firing her. “Look, I’m leaving for college pretty soon, so I just wanted to say hi to you one last time.”

His eyebrows lifted higher, but his expression was fond. “Oh. Hi.”

She cleared her throat. “Yeah. And I wanted to, uh… thank you. For that time. You know.”

He waved a hand. “You don’t have to thank me.”

“I do, though,” she insisted. Hoping he understood. It wasn’t just the ride she appreciated.

He stared at her for a moment, and she felt like he did understand. “Well. You’re welcome,” he said quietly.

They just looked at each other for a moment, and there was an odd, powerful solidarity between them that didn’t require words.

Beau broke the silence. “And also… I did wanna order a drink,” she added, lips twitching.

“I should have known you had an ulterior motive,” he said drily, but his smile was sincere. “What can I get for you, valued customer?”

“Hmm… let’s see.” She theatrically stroked her chin. “Do we still have Glitterpony Shake ingredients?”

He snorted. “Well, the promotion ended last month, I think, but we still have some ingredients left. Do you actually want one?”

“You know what?” she laughed. “Yeah, fuck it. I want one. Make that two, actually.”

He grabbed two plastic cups and began measuring out syrup. “I thought you hated them.”

“I mean… yeah. But I might as well, like… give ‘em one more shot, since this is the last time they’ll ever be available, right?”

“And what better libation to commemorate your career here than a Glitterpony Shake?” Caleb said, adding pink whipped cream to the top of each shake. He handed them to her. “Free of charge,” he said, winking.

She gasped. “Caleb! That’s illeeeegallllll.”

“Oh, hush.” He rolled his eyes, quirking a grin.

As she retreated towards the door, she called out, “Hey, I’ll text you, okay?”

“I’ll respond!” he called back.

She grinned and saluted him one last time and then she was out the door, condensation-coated drinks in hand.

Once she got to her car, she took a moment to tie up her hair in a top knot and then she drove back to her neighborhood, but instead of parking in front of her house she curved her route around to the trailhead at the edge of the wetland preserve. It was a short trail, only leading through the woods to a small suburban playground at the other end, but the dappled sunlight through the treetops was pretty in summer, and summer wasn’t quite completely over. Yet. There was a girl waiting for her at the trailhead, blue hair mottled in the dappled sunlight through the treetops, and she was pretty in summer too. (And in every other season.)

Jester waved ecstatically as soon as she saw Beau climbing out of the car. Beau’s heartbeat reverberated in her entire body. She was nervous but in a good way, like she was on a rollercoaster and she’d almost reached the drop. “Hey, Jester,” she called with a wave, trying for a ‘cool and collected’ vibe. (Her level of success was debatable.)

“Oh my god, did you get me a drink? You are so sweet, Beau! What a sweet, sunshiney thing to do!” Jester happily took one of the Glitterpony Shakes and began sucking whipped cream out of the straw.

Beau had never been described as sunshiney before. And she could also smell Jester’s perfume, and it was a little intoxicating, and she felt something weird in her belly, and she realized that the weird feeling was happiness. She hadn’t felt like this level of pure happiness in a long time. And that was fucking weird! Why was she so happy? Maybe this was what it felt like when she chose good things for herself. She smiled so hard her face hurt. “Thanks for coming out with me today,” she said earnestly.

Jester’s brown eyes widened in surprise, probably because Beau wasn’t typically very earnest. But then she was smiling too, and it looked like her face also hurt. “I’ve actually been wanting to hang out with you for a super long time. Like, forever.”

Now it was Beau’s turn to be surprised. As they headed onto the pine-needle-littered trail, she asked, “Really? Why didn’t you just, like… say that?”

Jester cast her eyelashes down, taking another sip of her shake. “I was too… nervous. I guess.”

“What?” Beau was genuinely confused as to why anyone would be too nervous to talk to her.

Jester huffed a breathy giggle. “I mean, you’re, like, so cool, and badass –”

“My whole badass persona thing worked?” Beau asked, laughing. “I thought everybody saw right through it.” It was funny that the thought didn’t make her sad anymore. She supposed it was because the opinions of her high school peers no longer felt significant.

“You ARE a badass, Beau,” Jester scoffed good-naturedly, hopping over a tree root that bisected the trail. “And you have cool hair, and cool clothes, and you’re smart, and cute – I mean –” She broke off, taking another long sip of her drink.

“You think I’m cute?” Beau asked incredulously, butterflies swarming in her ribcage.

“Yeah, obviously, whatever,” Jester said quickly, tossing her hair and skipping over another root.

Beau took a sip of her drink, contemplating that. Glitterpony Shakes were pretty good, actually. Possibly one of her favorite drinks from now on.

“Well… we’re hanging out now,” Beau pointed out.

“Yes, finally,” Jester said, smiling.

Beau looked at her. Jester looked back. Beau looked away.

“Um…” Beau awkwardly cleared her throat. “What school are you going to? This year?”

Jester pointed at her bright purple university hoodie and Beau laughed lightly. “Oh, yeah. Duh.” And then it hit her. “Wait. That’s where I’m going, too!”

Jester’s beam brightened to near-blinding levels. “We can keep hanging out this year!”

Beau grinned. “Yeah. We can. Or…” she drifted off, taking a beat to get her bearings.

She observed her surroundings – the bright pink wild roses, the primordial ferns, the afternoon light filtering through the trees and hitting the undergrowth, the packed dirt of the trail, the moss on the trunks, the exact shade of blue of Jester’s hair, the slightly smudged mascara under her eyes, her bee-shaped earrings, her height in relation to Beau, the way Beau felt when their eyes locked. This moment was important, she could feel it, and she wanted to remember it forever because of how significant it was that she was finally romanticizing the present instead of the future. The happiness she’d always dreamed about was here. It was now. And she’d created it.

“We could… go on a date. If you want.” Beau desperately wanted to stare anywhere but Jester’s eyes, but she forced herself to maintain eye contact because it felt right. It felt strong.

Jester smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading! Although this story hasn't gotten as much of a response as some of my other writing, it's still very close to my heart and I hope that if you've read this far, you've enjoyed reading it as much as I've enjoyed writing it! I really wanted to write a story about the way growing up is this complicated jumble of silly moments and emotionally raw moments and about how sometimes you don't get what you think you want but you can still be happy anyway. I really appreciate the kudos, comments, and the time you've spent reading, and I hope you're doing well <3

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Title is from 'Hood' by Perfume Genius. Give it a listen if you would like to experience some Emotions


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